Catherine Airey & Gurnaik Johal

Discover two outstanding new talents in fiction as Catherine Airey and Gurnaik Johal – both shortlisted for the 2025 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize – join us for a conversation about their novels.

Catherine Airey’s Confessions is an essential, immersive debut from an astonishing new voice. It traces the arc of three generations of women from rural Ireland to New York City as they experience the irresistible gravity of the past and the beauty and terrible shade of the things we do.

In Saraswati, Gurnaik Johal conjures a resurgent river in Northern India and a diaspora of relatives whose lives are upended by its return. Brimming with love, lust, violence and loss, Johal’s magisterial debut deftly animates the passions that bind us to our histories, our lands and each other.