Josh Silver's new thriller Fruit Fly lives up to the BookTok hype (and then some)

'Savage and darkly hilarious': why everyone's talking about Fruit Fly

I’m almost embarrassed to admit how I found Fruit Fly.

It was BookTok, obviously.

But three chapters in, the embarrassment was gone and the obsession had well and truly set in.

Josh Silver’s adult debut follows Mallory Maddox, a literary novelist buried under seven years of writer’s block, watching her once-glittering career fizzle out in real time.

Desperate for a way back in, Mallory fixes her attention on Leo, a young man sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival.

She decides his story is the one she needs to tell. He never gets a say in it.

What follows is a psychological thriller with real teeth, a story about who gets to tell someone else’s pain, who profits from it, and what people will sacrifice to finally be heard.

Author Juno Dawson called it “savage and darkly hilarious”, and honestly, that’s the perfect two-word summary.

It’s funny in the way only genuinely uncomfortable books manage to be, and it does not let you look away from the ugliest parts of what it’s examining.

Fruit Fly has landed on the BBC’s list of must-read books for 2026, and Anne Hathaway reportedly picked it for her book club, calling it her “gimme” read of the year.

A24 UK has also optioned it for a TV series, with Silver on board as executive producer, so this almost certainly won’t be the last you hear of Mallory and Leo. I cannot wait.

READ MORE: Everything we know about the Fruit Fly TV adaptation so far

It’s out now through Australian booksellers including Booktopia, QBD and Readings.

Part of the fun of finishing Fruit Fly was falling down the rabbit hole on its author afterwards.

Silver grew up on a farm in England’s Lake District before moving to Manchester as a teenager, and later trained at RADA.

He also works as a mental health nurse for teenagers, which tracks the moment you clock how precisely he writes about vulnerability and exploitation.

Fruit Fly is his first novel for adults, but he already has a backlist worth chasing.

His YA debut HappyHead was shortlisted for the 2024 YA Book Prize and nominated for the Carnegie Medal, with a sequel, Dead Happy, following in 2024.

He also has the standalone psychological thriller TraumaLand.

I’ve already added all three to my own list, and if Fruit Fly is anything to go by, that’s exactly where I’m headed next.