In the summer of 1830, a minister and his wife set out to bring Christianity and modernity to the desperately poor and isolated inhabitants of St Kilda, 10 hours’ sail west of the Hebrides. On this rocky outcrop they find their marriage and sanity tested; but there’s rugged beauty, too, in this Swedish author’s debut, based on the testimony of a historical figure. Our reviewer found the descriptive passages ‘stunning’
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This is the third novel from the Irish high-flying banker turned thriller writer. Here she brings her City background to bear on the tale of a young woman in meltdown: it’s 1991, and Geri Molloy is earning squillions at a London investment bank, holding her own on the brutal trading floor, but falling apart in private
Aifric Campbell’s website
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Cohen is an established talent in the US, where the New York Times called this novel about the disparate members of a family struggling to recover from the loss of their newborn baby the best work yet from 'one of our foremost chroniclers of the mundane complexities, nuanced tragedies and unexpected tendernesses of human connection'
Leah Hager Cohen’s website
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Room, a harrowing story of incarceration and release seen through a child’s eyes, made Donoghue a star, but her previous work was rather different; she’d been writing vivid historical novels, often based on real-life sources, for years before. The Sealed Letter, originally published in Canada in 2008, is one of these: set in 1864, it is based on a scandalous divorce case of the time. 'Briskly written, deftly plotted and nicely ironic,' said our reviewer - but not at all what Room fans might be expecting
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Emma Donoghue’s website
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The Canadian author’s novel about African-American and Afro-German jazz musicians, whose music is banned under the Nazi regime, revisits the survivors 50 years on to explore themes of betrayal and persecution alongside the joy of music and youth. It made it to the Booker shortlist last year
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Esi Edugyan’s website
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After the bleak intensity of Enright’s Booker winner novel The Gathering, her next, a story of love and betrayal set in Dublin’s boom years, is giddy on Sauvignon Blanc, sex and success. But like the economic bubble, this dizzy rush can't last. What makes this story - sentimental in outline, commonplace in details - remarkable is the voice of Gina, our 21st-century seductress and narrator. Where once the price of transgression in Ireland would have been scandal and shame now it is property: 'Who would have thought love could be so expensive? ... The price of this house plus the price of that house, divided by two ... Thousands. Every time I touch him'
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The 'flying man', antihero of Farooki’s fifth novel, was, she has explained, partly inspired by her father - 'a compulsive gambler, an occasional white-collar convict, a casual abandoner of wives and children, a man who was frequently as bad as his word and who cheerfully lived and died beyond his means'. Maqil Karam tries on lives for size in London, Madrid, Hong Kong, always haunted by memories of his early days and lost twin in Pakistan. Our reviewer applauded the novel’s 'seductive adventure', but yearned for a 'little more selection'
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Roopa Farooki’s website
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Set among the down-at-heel race tracks and second-rate horse trainers of West Virginia, this novel was inevitably described as a ‘dark horse’ when it became the surprise winner of a US National Book Award and won comparisons to Steinbeck and Faulkner. Gordon has been a small-press author for decades, but this book is bringing her wider fame
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Harding builds on two previous assured and distinctive novels with this portrait of Romania during and after the second world war. A deaf-mute man, traumatised by his wartime experiences, begins to draw the past for a young nurse with whom he shared a childhood connection
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Harris’ first novel, rollicking Victorian maid’s tale The Observations, was a critical hit. Her follow-up is another book about loneliness and obsessive love, but this time the narrator is an elderly woman in the 1930s, looking back on art, love and tragedy 40 years previously. Hindsight illuminates the personal tragedy of Victorian spinsterhood for a heroine who is 'not likeable, but compelling'
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Jane Harris’s website
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Kay’s first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange New Writers’ award. Her followup explores faith, motherhood and isolation, through the ripples that spread when a devout and simple-minded young woman witnesses a 'miracle' in a Catholic church in Battersea. Many of the characters touched by events are lost or adrift; Kay probes their hidden selves with economy and precision
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Kennedy’s knotty, ludic novel takes a cruise ship as its setting and the tenebrous activities of mediums and magicians as its subject. Narrator Beth embarks on a transatlantic voyage with her unremarkable boyfriend, Derek, but can’t shake the attentions of close-up conjuror Arthur. As the novel unfolds, so does Arthur and Beth’s shared history - until the secret that lies at the heart of their relationship is revealed. A masterclass in manipulation
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AL Kennedy’s website
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Ten years in the writing, this poetic yet muscular American debut revisits the siege of Troy to show the human side of the demigod warrior Achilles. It’s told from the point of view of his lover, Patroclus (whose death in the Iliad is the spur for Achilles to rejoin the battle). Our reviewer called it 'a deeply affecting version of the Achilles story: a fully three-dimensional man – a son, a father, husband and lover – now exists where a superhero previously stood and fought'
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Madeline Miller’s website
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Magicians' apprentices Celia and Marco are bound together by a wager between their mentors about which sort of magic is best – the instinctive or the scrupulously studied. Their lifelong rivalry, which neither fully understands, takes place in a magically depicted 19th-century pavilion of mirrors, clocks and circus eccentrics. Morgernstern's background as an artist and theatre-maker shows in this enchanting exploration of illusion, love and manipulation, which was shortlisted for the Guardian first book prize
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Erin Morgernstern’s website
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The latest novel from the wonderful Ozick is a direct response to The Ambassadors, the novel by her literary touchstone, Henry James. The year is 1952, and teacher Bea Nightingale has been despatched to Europe by her hectoring brother in search of her nephew, Julian. Ozick anatomises the experience of foreignness - of country and, more profoundly, of race - in a novel that moves beyond far homage
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Ann Patchett took the Orange prize for Bel Canto in 2002, and is back this year with a novel that tackles contemporary issues of age, childbearing, corporate involvement in healthcare and our collective responsibility for our planet’s wildernesses. Pharmacologist Marina Singh travels to the Amazonian jungle in search of a vanished colleague, and encounters Professor Annick Swenson, engaged in research into why local tribal women are able to bear children into their 70s. Fraught and intriguing
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Ann Patchett’s website
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When the appalling Gen and Eric arrange an 'alternative' dinner party in their lovely Greenwich home, they expect the guests to be gone with the scallops and chorizo – they certainly aren’t expecting one to lock himself into the spare room and refuse to leave. This is the third Orange longlisting from Smith, and marks the triumphant return of the devastating stranger-calls scenario familiar from her Whitbread-winning novel, The Accidental
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A 17-year-old girl flies from London to Los Angeles for the funeral of her estranged mother. After stealing a suitcase of effects from her mother's room in a Venice Beach hotel, she spends her summer travelling around the city returning love letters and photographs to the men whom her mother had known. As she discovers more about her mother’s past, she finds herself unable to avoid confronting questions about her own
Anna Stothard’s website
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Tillyard joins the ranks of historians who are defaulting to historical fiction with this lively debut novel set in the Napoleonic Wars. Historical figures such as the Duke of Wellington, the artist Goya and the financier Nathan Rothschild cavort through its pages alongside the fictional characters, in a novel of ingeniously interlocking plots which illuminates a London on the point of forsaking the candles of antiquity for electric lighting of the modern age
Stella Tillyard’s website
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What happens when the winner of an anonymous competition for an architect to design a new memorial on Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 turns out to be a Muslim? This is the premise of Waldman’s audacious debut novel, also shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award last year. With a diverse range of characters, multiple storylines and willingness to address some of the biggest questions today, The Submission marks the arrival of a significant talent
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