Tom Newlands returns with Something Like Happiness, a second novel about love, anger and autism in small-town Scotland
Tom Newlands' second novel, Something Like Happiness, arrives in August 2026 with a Guardian review already in print — and a story that picks up the threads his debut left dangling.
The novel, due for publication this month, follows Frazer and Caitlin, teenage sweethearts now in their mid-twenties and parents to a five-year-old son named Jamie, who has autism. They live in a decaying flat in a Scottish new town — the post-war planned communities built to relocate people from overcrowded cities. The plot turns on a single act of violence: during a vicious argument, Caitlin punches Frazer, felling him, and the novel tracks the fallout from that blow across their relationship and their fragile family life (The Guardian).
Newlands is billed as a neurodivergent writer, a label that carries across both his published novels. His 2024 debut, Only Here, Only Now, followed a teenager named Cora Mowat growing up on a seaside council estate — public housing built and managed by the local authority — whose restless "fizziness" turns out to be undiagnosed ADHD. The book drew warm notices: The Guardian described its prose as "both muscular and airy" in a June 2024 review (The Guardian), while an earlier piece in the same paper called it a visceral coming-of-age tale examining belonging, poverty and rage (The Guardian).
The Bookseller, the UK trade publication covering the publishing industry, described the new novel in June as "a story about love and the obstacles it must overcome" (The Bookseller). That description lines up with what the Guardian review foregrounds: not the row itself, but the labour of rebuilding a life around a child whose needs are enormous and a relationship that has turned physically volatile.
For readers who found Cora Mowat's story in the debut, Something Like Happiness shifts the lens. The first book centred a young woman's interior experience of an undiagnosed condition in a place with few resources. The second moves the neurodivergent experience one generation along — Jamie is the autistic child, and his parents are the ones navigating a system and a relationship under pressure. The setting stays in Scotland, and the class politics stay sharp.
August is a crowded month in the UK publishing calendar, when houses push titles they hope will ride summer reading lists into autumn prize submissions. Newlands is a relatively young novelist with one well-received book behind him. Whether Something Like Happiness earns a place on prize longlists is a matter for juries later in the year; what the Guardian review establishes on publication day is that the book has arrived and is being read seriously.
