There’s nothing quite like diving into a novel, knowing you have hundreds of pages ahead of you to get lost in someone else’s story. But it’s not just one person’s narrative that Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love (Hodder & Stoughton) tells – it’s many. Through a series of short stories, Huma Qureshi explores our relationships with those closest to us, touching on feelings of shame, secrecy, loneliness, longing and bitterness. Spanning multiple generations, races and countries, the poignant collection draws on the empathy of the reader, deftly portraying how one’s sense of self affects our most intimate relationships.

“Although limited in pages, the stories hold a depth that many lengthy tomes fail to deliver,” says Stylist Loves deputy editor Annie Simpson. “Qureshi fully captivates the reader in so few pages, with each of the narratives just as absorbing as the last. I especially loved The Jam Maker, a tale of a young girl who struggles with her sense of belonging following the untimely loss of her father, and Too Much, told from the perspective of a single mother who encounters a profound sense of loss after a sudden and unexplained distance grows between her and her adult daughter. Through Qureshi’s poetic style and evocative language, nothing is lost through the stories being short, with the bonus that that feeling of emptiness you experience at the end of a really good book is short-lived – all you have to do is turn the page and there’s another character with their own unique and often familiar struggles lying in wait.” £16.98, Bookshop.org