The Palm House

by Gwendoline Riley (author)

• Hardback
• 224 pages
• The Booker Longlist 2026

The Palm House might be my favourite novel of 2026 so far . . . It's very funny and so full of pathos and horror . . . I wanted to go back to the beginning and start again
Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Times

This pristine book confirms Riley's position among the finest novelists working today. Her sentences are crystalline and perfect, and her attention to the world is always acute and occasionally tender - I love this book, and am awed by Riley's accomplishment
Sarah Perry, award-winning author of The Essex Serpent and Death of an Ordinary Man

Riley writes with a poet's control, her prose so purely distilled that it appears artless . . . What is new is the gentle delicacy she brings to the deep and unshowy solace of friendship, moments of tenderness so exquisitely and exactly rendered that they are almost too intense to bear- The Guardian