Barnes's powerful short novel has already won the Booker prize and prompted many discussions among readers about the reliability of its narrator and the events he describes. Fittingly so, for its subject is the unreliability of memory, the compromises of ageing, and the mysteries of other people.
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Set on a far-north Norwegian island under the endless milky light of midsummer, A Summer of Drowning tells the story of Liv, a loner who lives with her artist mother and spends her days visiting her elderly neighbour Kyrre, who beguiles her with tales of trolls and lost children. When two teenage boys drown in calm water under the midnight sun, Kyrre maintains that a malevolent forest-spirit drove them to it. Burnside's gloriously atmospheric novel is both a supernatural mystery and a delicate investigation into narrative reliability
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On the eve of the French revolution, the cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris is overflowing, poisoning the city around it. A young engineer is charged with the grand Enlightenment project of exhuming the bodies and demolishing the church. But shadows of the past prove harder to budge than he expected
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There are echoes of Atonement in this first world war novel, as lovers from across the class divide are separated further by conflict. Young blends fact and fiction as she charts the pioneering surgery perfected on the wounded (the title comes from the standard-issue postcard whereby soldiers informed loved ones of injuries), in a novel that gives equal weight to the war at home
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Barry's exuberant 2007 short story collection promised great things, and his debut novel delivers, with a phantasmagoria sent in the west of Ireland in 2053. It's a retro future laid out in a fizzing vernacular as various tribes struggle for control of Bohane and its 'hoors, herb, fetish parlours, grog pits, needle alleys, dream salons and Chinese restaurants'
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Longlisted for the Booker prize, this thriller about the end of the the Soviet era is by a poet who draws on his own experience as an English language teacher in Ceaucescu's Romania in the late 1980s. The unnamed narrator goes over to work in a Romanian university, only to find himself snarled up in the juddering engines of a dying dictatorship. Strung between the daughter of a party apparatchik, dissident people-smugglers and rogue academics, the unnamed narrator struggles to keep a sense of reality in a world that is increasingly and scarily surreal. Read reviews of The Last Hundred Days Photograph: PR
When her parents split up, 12-year-old Blessing is uprooted from her comfortable life in Lagos and moved to her mother's village in the Niger Delta, where she finds that the warmth of family life endures despite desperate poverty and the depredations of big oil. "It takes the reader deep into the reality of ordinary life in Nigeria and is also funny, moving and politically alert", said Giles Foden
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Young's debut sets out the multicultural history of Jamaica in the 20th century, lifting the lid on a vanished world: Kingston's Chinatown, where the eponymous Chinese antihero arrives in 1938, fleeing the Japanese invasion, and is taken under the wing of his gangster uncle. Young sprinkles island patois into her tale of violence, entrepreneurism, and complex racial and religious codes
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After moving with her husband to a mountain village in northern Italy, Julia Blackburn – twice shortlisted for the Orange prize as a novelist – found herself tasked with recording the memories of a community who had grown up as mezzadri, "half-people", trapped in an archaic feudal system which still practised a form of droit du seigneur. In telling their story, she evokes the strangeness of the landscape, whiie describing a way of life that changed for ever with the outbreak of the second world war.
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Patrick Cockburn is best known as Iraq correspondent for the Independent. He was on assignment in Afghanistan when he learned that his 20-year-old son, Henry, had nearly drowned after trying to swim across Newhaven estuary during a February freeze. Ten days later, Henry was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This is their account of Henry’s illness and of the journey towards understanding what it meant to a father and son on different sides of the barrier of mental illness.
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The final five years of Edward Thomas’s life, before he made the fatal journey to fight in the first world war, were notable for his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost. As his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote some of his richest poetry, working through the creative and domestic torments that had held him back. With walk-on parts for characters such as WB Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke, this acclaimed debut biography, from a writer best known as a poet, evokes a key moment in English literature on the cusp of catastrophic change.
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Tomalin's last brush with Dickens was as the eminence gris behind her biography of Nelly Ternan, the "forgotten woman" in his life. She returns to the great Victorian in a book which excavates his reputation as a novelist and campaigner in time for next year's bicentenary celebrations while confronting the contradictions in the character of a man who would mortgage his home to help a young unmarried mother but treat his own wife with brutal contempt.
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Duffy's first collection since her appointment as poet laureate offers a joyful grab-bag of form and subject, mixing the lyric with the deadpan, the political with the elegiac - and all buzzed about with the bees of the title
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Harsent's latest collection is a tenebrous study of darkness and loss, in which the deceptively dextrous lines are lit by jewel-like vignettes of night-life, glimpsed through half-open doors and smeary windows
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The title of Kay's collection, which stands as a companion piece to her 2010 autobiography, Red Dust Road, is the old Scots word for "companion" or "mate". It sets the tone for a collection that manages to tackle the prickly subjects of families and relationships with a warmth and optimism that never once strays into sentimentality
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Set in a water-logged, post-industrial north-east, November stands as a sequel of sorts to O'Brien's remarkable multi-award-winning 2007 collection The Drowned Book. Lanced with humour, but for the most part profoundly elegiac, these are unique, authoritative poems Read reviews of November Photograph: PR
What would it be like to wake up in someone else's body? In this psychological thriller, 14-year-old Alex lives a pretty normal teenage existence until he wakes up one morning to discover that, overnight, he has become another teenager, called Phillip, or Flip. How have six whole months passed since he fell asleep? And if he's Flip – where's Alex?
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Looking back on something that happened when she was in year six, Julie tells the story of the unexpected arrival at the school of Chingis and Nergui, two brothers from Mongolia. When they ask her to become their "Good Guide", Julie gets completely caught up in their stories; it is hard to tell the imaginary from the horribly real dangers they face
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Pint-sized Stuart embarks on an awfully big adventure in this quirky puzzle-solving novel for 8+ readers. Uprooted from London by his kindly but distracted parents, Stuart finds himself with nothing to do in his seemingly lifeless new hometown. But a long-lost letter from a long-lost great uncle sets Stuart off unlocking one baffling puzzle after another
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The first in a planned dystopian trilogy for teens, this searing debut has been compared to Cormac McCarthy and optioned by Ridley Scott. It tells the story of Saba's epic quest to get her beloved twin brother back after he is captured in an apocalyptic monster sandstorm. Teaming up with a gang of girl revolutionaries she finds she has the power to change a corrupt society from the inside - and change the course of her own civilisation along the way
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