Salt’s top 10 comic fiction titles to read in 2027

Salt’s top 10 comic fiction titles to read in 2027

Ten novels that prove the form is alive – from a Brexit-era apocalyptic farce to a Belfast literary annexation, with new books from Tibor Fischer, Rob Palk, Bill Broady, Guy Ware, Rosemary Jenkinson and more.

Comic fiction is one of the things Salt does best. From Tibor Fischer's late-style satire of the Dubai super-rich to Rosemary Jenkinson's wicked anatomy of literary Belfast, our list is built on writers whose first instrument is comedy – and whose deepest subject is everything else.

What follows is ten of the best, ordered by year of publication. Some are forthcoming. Some have been quietly building a readership for a decade. All of them take seriously the proposition that funny is a form of telling the truth.

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1. Nutcase – Tony Williams (2017)

Williams' second novel is a darkly hilarious portrait of Aidan Wilson, a young offender from one of Sheffield's roughest estates whose misfortune is to be hard as nails. The pace is relentless; the moral framing is unsparing. Selected for Read Regional 2019, Nutcase belongs alongside Ross Raisin's God's Own Country and Benjamin Myers in the lineage of contemporary northern English fiction that finds comedy at exactly the point where most writers would default to social realism.

Buy Nutcase on the Salt site →

2. Faculty of Indifference – Guy Ware (2019)

Robert Exley works for the Faculty, in counter-terrorism: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. His wife worked there too. She's been dead for years, but somehow she's never far away. Ware writes the deadpan bureaucratic absurd as well as anyone working in English – with the same patient menace as the early Don DeLillo, and a tighter line in jokes.

Buy The Faculty of Indifference on the Salt site →

3. Our Island Story – Guy Ware (2024)

A Brexit-era apocalyptic farce in which an Island is either sinking or being drowned (it depends what you believe), the saviour is a newly-elected Leader called Jessica King, and the feckless scion Denis Klamm has come home for his father's funeral. Ware's nearest cousins here are Will Self at his most readable and J. G. Ballard at his driest – and as a paired reading with The Faculty of Indifference, it shows him operating at the full reach of his political imagination.

Buy Our Island Story on the Salt site →

4. Night-Soil Men – Bill Broady (2024)

A New Statesman Book of the Day. Broady's major work of fiction – nearly a decade in the writing – is a sprawling, sardonic account of the founding of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 Bradford, threading the lives of Fred Jowett, Philip Snowden, and Victor Grayson through the squalid materials of late-Victorian municipal politics. It belongs in the company of Hilary Mantel's earlier comic novels: serious history with a savagely funny eye for the human furniture of belief.

Buy The Night-Soil Men on the Salt site →

5. The Fox of Kensal Green – Richard Tyrrell (2026)

The Best New Fiction, Mail on Sunday; a Daily Mail Dazzling Debut for 2026. Wilf Kelly, a quiet man in a quiet neighbourhood, tames a wild fox on the quiet, and through that small act of attention finds himself returning to a self he had nearly forgotten. Tyrrell's debut sits in the warmest stretch of English comic writing – Joe Dunthorne, Nina Stibbe, the Beryl Bainbridge of the later novels – and is the book on this list most likely to make you cry on a train.

Buy The Fox of Kensal Green on the Salt site →

6. My Bags Are Big – Tibor Fischer (2026)

The best fiction to read this year, New Statesman. One of Shortlist's 25 most anticipated novels of 2026. Fischer's first novel for Salt is a darkly comic satire of wealth, reinvention, and regret, set against the surreal backdrop of Dubai. The voice is unmistakable: glinting, exact, and decades-deep in the practice of making English do things that other writers cannot quite get it to do. For readers who came to Fischer through Under the Frog and The Thought Gang, this is the late-career book.

Buy My Bags Are Big on the Salt site →

7. There's No 'F' in Wonderful – Bill Broady (July 2026)

The second Broady on the list, and a deliberate inclusion: he is one of the comic novelists Salt has been most committed to over the longest period. There's No 'F' in Wonderful is told in the first person by a casino croupier escaping 'the Heat' – literal and metaphorical – to a new city in the North; his flatmate is a Ducati-riding pharmaceutical pilferer, his interrogating policeman quotes John Donne, and the novel's comic intelligence sits squarely in the lineage of Patrick Hamilton and B. S. Johnson. Read alongside The Night-Soil Men, it confirms Broady as one of the most distinctive voices in English fiction over the past forty years.

Discover There's No 'F' in Wonderful on the Salt site →

8. Animal Lovers – Rob Palk (October 2026)

Stuart Block is thirty-three, partially sighted, recently married, and watching his wife of four months pack her bags. Marie isn't leaving him for another man, exactly. She is leaving him for the badgers. Palk's Animal Lovers – originally published in 2016, now reissued ahead of The Crowd Pleaser in 2027 – is among the finest English comic debuts of the past decade, and reads, ten years on, like a small modern classic. If you have not yet found Palk, this is where to start.

Discover Animal Lovers on the Salt site →

9. The Crowd Pleaser – Rob Palk (February 2027)

The long-awaited follow-up to Animal Lovers. Mike Perry is a stand-up who has built a career on confessional honesty, returning home for the funeral of Chris, the oldest friend and far greater talent he has spent fifteen years failing to save. What unfolds is a novel about comedy itself – its uses, its bad faith, its corrosive intimacy with grief – and one of the most exact accounts in recent English fiction of how a successful life can hollow out from the inside. Palk's first instrument is still comedy; his subject here is what comedy costs.

Discover The Crowd Pleaser on the Salt site →

10. The Appropriators – Rosemary Jenkinson (June 2027)

The list closes with the funniest book on it – and the most pitiless. Cara McQueen is twenty-nine, has just signed a two-book deal with one of London's biggest imprints, and is the new firebrand of Belfast letters (or so the press would have it; she was christened Jess until her editor suggested otherwise). Then she meets Michael Madden – forty-one, charming, returning home to reinvent himself as a novelist – and the literary annexations begin. Jenkinson's epigraph is Wilde: the true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything. A savage anatomy of literary ambition, in the line of Brandon Taylor and Otessa Moshfegh.

Discover The Appropriators on the Salt site →

Browse more

For readers who like their comic fiction at its most experimental, Simon Okotie's In the Absence of Absalon (2017, longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize) is a slow, syntactically precise pleasure – funny in the way that late Beckett is funny. And for the full Salt comic-fiction shelf, including back-catalogue favourites by David Gaffney, Padrika Tarrant and Tony Williams: browse the Salt fiction list →.

Chris Hamilton-Emery was born in 1963 in Manchester. He has published five collections of poetry, a writer's guide, an anthology of art and poems, and edited selections of Emily Brontë, Keats and Rossetti. His latest poetry collection, Wonder, is out now from Salt. He works in publishing and lives in Norfolk.

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