Best novels: top books to read this year

Killing Time by Alan Bennett

Spreading to little more than 100 pages only thanks to "large print and generous spacing", Alan Bennett's new book – his first in five years – is essentially a "short story", said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Yet it "contains multitudes". One by one, we are introduced to the residents of a care home: Mrs McBryde, the prideful manager; Mr Woodruff, an inveterate flasher; Gloria, a long-haired "suburban sphinx", and so on. Getting to know them is so much fun that you barely wonder "where, if anywhere, it's all heading". But the year is 2020 and, sure enough, a mystery virus soon appears, bringing anarchy to the home. Bennett, now 90, has written a "late-period mini-masterpiece" that packs a punch. 

Bennett is brilliant on the "queasy details", said Max Liu in the Financial Times. There's a lunch plate on which the "dregs of the turkey mince had congealed into what remained of the Angel Delight"; for a carer in the home, work means "another long and phlegm-flecked afternoon". Yet as fiction, Killing Time doesn't quite succeed: there are "too many characters" for a novella, and the chronology feels a bit muddled. 

I disagree, said Oliver Soden in The Spectator. Bennett's "ear for the tiny idiosyncrasies of language" remains as sharp as ever. A "geriatric Lord of the Flies", this book is a triumph.

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Gliff by Ali Smith

Ali Smith's masterful "Seasonal Quartet" – four novels about Brexit Britain – was "as close to livestreamed literature as the technology would allow", said Alex Preston in The Observer. Now, Smith has taken "the logical next step" with a novel set in a dystopian near-future Britain. It's a society where certain people are classed as "unverifiables", and have red lines painted around their homes – as a prelude to these being bulldozed. This is what happens to the family of Bri, the novel's non-binary, word-loving narrator, who finds themselves on the run with their sister "from a force that is both faceless, terrifying and banal in its relentless bureaucracy".

As usual, Smith's language is "rich and dazzling", said John Self in The Times. Few writers are better at reminding us that "novels are constructed, brick by brick, from individual words". So it's a shame that the story is so one-dimensional: Smith's villains are "cookie- cutter authoritarians"; Bri, by contrast, is a virtuous "innocent". "Gliff" is a novel that "Smith admirers" will welcome, while leaving "agnostics unpersuaded".

Juice by Tim Winton

In a recent essay, the Australian novelist Tim Winton urged writers "to look the climate crisis in the eye", said James Bradley in The Spectator. That's something Winton does in his 13th novel, a gripping futuristic thriller set "in a world transformed by rising temperatures". Having grown up in a place so hot that summers had to be spent underground, the unnamed narrator describes being recruited, in his late teens, by a shadowy organisation known as "the Service". Its mission is to fight "the descendants of the billionaires and corporate executives whose profiteering cooked the planet". Still living off the proceeds of their forebears' actions, they now live in fortified bunkers, or platforms in the sea.

Juice is a novel that offers "dual pleasures", said Luke Kennard in The Daily Telegraph: on the one hand, it's a Mad Max-style "high-octane" thriller; on the other, it's a detailed account of survival that recalls Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Winton's prose is "clean and unaffected", and the "twists are plausible and devastating". It makes for a "furious hymn to resilience, unsentimental and hard-won".

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

In certain quarters, a "Sally Rooney backlash" has been building, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The Irish writer's novels – most famously, "Normal People" – are, some say, "too white" and "a bit corny". No doubt her staggering commercial success also "rankles". Yet her new novel should silence the doubters: "wise, resonant and witty", "Intermezzo" is a book I admired "almost without reservation". It tells the story of two brothers: Peter, a successful Dublin barrister in his early 30s, and "shyer, geekier" Ivan, ten years younger, who "wears ceramic braces and plays competitive chess". Both are in mourning for their father, who recently died from cancer. As ever, love is the "primary subject". Peter is "caught between two women" – serious Sylvia, his long-time girlfriend, and the "more feral" Naomi, who is 23. Ivan is falling for an older arts-centre worker named Margaret. Inevitably, there is lots of (superbly described) sex, along with "fluid and exact" writing about chess and exquisitely well-perceived emotion. I spent a couple of days with the book, and it "made my burdens feel lighter".

This is Rooney's "richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements", said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Gone is the self-consciousness that bedevilled her last novel, "Beautiful World, Where Are You". Here, she "leans fully into her gifts". There is something "electrically compelling" about the way that defining events in the brothers' shared past – notably their parents' divorce – play out in the present. "The reader always feels different layers of grief at play – buried pain exhumed by fresh hurt – in a way that feels stingingly true to life."

Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq

Michel Houellebecq once admitted that what he most wanted was to move his readers. "That's what I admire most in literature," he said: "the ability to make you weep." With his new novel (which he says will be his last), the reliably "scabrous" 68-year-old has finally made good on that ambition, said David Sexton in The Spectator. At first, "Annihilation" appears to be a political thriller in the mould of Houellebecq's last novel, "Serotonin", which was set during the "gilets jaunes" protests. Paul, its 50-year-old protagonist, is a special adviser to France's "brilliant finance minister", who is embroiled in a plot to install a "puppet president". A subplot involves environmentalists who are engaged in "cabbalistic cyberterrorism". Yet as it progresses, these themes recede and a different story emerges, centred on Paul's father, who has suffered a severe stroke. What results is a "deeply affecting novel about love and death and the way we treat the dying".

None of it, to me, felt terribly convincing, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Having begun promisingly enough, the novel turns into an incoherent mishmash. From the "scandal of end-of-life care facilities" to the "content of Paul's dreams", it "dilates" on many themes without ever arriving on a central subject. Never has Houellebecq been so "thoroughly dull".

There may be "longueurs" and a few implausible plot twists, said Michael Gove in The Times. "But there is also a sympathy, compassion and tenderness" that is far more pronounced than in his previous work. The former "enfant terrible" now seemingly wants to be a "doting grandpère" – and the shift in register is welcome.

The Party by Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley is an "old hand at short stories", but "The Party" is her first novella, said Fiona Sturges in the i news site. Set in Bristol soon after the Second World War, it begins with two sisters – Evelyn and Moira – attending a gathering in an old dockers' pub. There, they get talking to "two strange men" – both much posher than they are – by whom they are "simultaneously fascinated and repelled". Displaying her customary "emotional acuity", Hadley dissects the sisters' rivalrous relationship, with its "see-sawing camaraderie and resentment", and vividly evokes the atmosphere of late 1940s Bristol. A study in "artfully compressed, quietly subversive drama", "The Party" is "captivating".

After the pub scene, the action moves to the sisters' home life, and finally to another party they've been invited to, held in a "crumbling country house", said Philip Womack in the FT. It's a gathering that "begins in stiffness and ends in bohemian excess". Written in prose so beautiful that "you linger over each lucent phrase", "The Party" is a "glimmering, sensuous" addition to Hadley's "supremely elegant oeuvre".

What a Way to Go by Bella Mackie

When the "impossibly rich" financier Anthony Wistern is found "skewered on a huge metal spike" in the grounds of his Cotswolds manor, suspicion falls on his close relations, said Alison Flood in The Observer. Was the murderer one of his four "grasping children"? Or his icy wife, Olivia? Bella Mackie's second novel (following her bestselling debut How to Kill Your Family) is another "dark, funny story about a very dysfunctional family". Every character is "dreadful" – apart from the "rather sweet" true-crime podcaster who becomes involved in the investigation – but in a "pleasurably awful way". The influence of Succession is perhaps a little too obvious, said Jenny Colgan in The Guardian: there's even a sycophantic "would-be Wambsgans". And Mackie could have gone to town a little more on her descriptions of "fancy parties, funerals and events". That said, What a Way to Go is "undeniably funny, with many class-bound barbs that reminded me of Jilly Cooper", and its twisty plot "dances along". Mackie has produced another "excellently tart addition to your reading buffet".

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Munichs by David Peace

The Munich air disaster of 1958 was a "defining moment in English football history", said Houman Barekat in the Financial Times. Twenty-three people (including eight players) were killed when the plane taking the Manchester United team home from a European Cup match crashed on take-off at Munich-Riem Airport. In his latest novel, David Peace – who has "made a career of turning real-life events into fiction" – tells the story of the tragedy. Having opened with the crash itself, the "third-person chronological narrative" moves to its aftermath – there are "moving scenes at hospital bedsides, detailed descriptions of funeral processions" – before culminating in a "cobbled together" United side reaching the FA Cup Final three months later. Simply as a feat of "information management", Munichs is hugely impressive. But in the author's "sensitive weighting of tone and timbre, and the elegant simplicity of the dialogue", there is "artistry" too.

Peace hasn't always been the most "welcoming" of writers, said James Walton in The Sunday Times. With their "hammering repetition", his novels, such as "Red or Dead" (a 700-page account of Bill Shankley's time as Liverpool manager) and "Patient X" (about an obscure early 20th century Japanese writer), have seemed designed to turn people off. Yet here, a "new, reader-friendly Peace" emerges – one who has toned down his incantatory style. It's true that he can be "a little too thorough": the victims and survivors of the crash – all "unfailingly decent" – are supplied with enormously detailed backstories. But you realise that "Peace is commemorating not just these individuals, but a whole vanished Britain that they represented" – and the overall effect is "irresistibly stirring".

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin

This entertaining debut novel by the critic Lauren Elkin is a "brainy sex comedy"s et in pre-Covid Paris, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Its narrator, Anna, is a Franco- American psychoanalyst whose lawyer husband is away for the summer, on a job in London, "leaving her to oversee the long-planned knocking through of a wall in their Belleville apartment". Anna feels lonely and adrift, until she meets Clementine, an art history postgraduate who has just moved into the same building. Clementine challenges many of Anna's assumptions – about property ownership, psychoanalysis, marriage – and also "widens" her "sexual horizons", drawing her into a ménage à trois with her boyfriend. Elkin's prose can be clumsy, and at times this novel feels overly introspective, said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The i Paper. But as it develops, it becomes a "truly fascinating" study of the messiness of the human condition. In non-fiction books such as Art Monsters and Flâneuse, Elkin has shown herself to be an "astute" thinker; here, she proves equally "inventive" as a novelist.

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Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler

Halle Butler made her name writing novels about the precarious lives of millennials, said Caleb Klaces in The Guardian. Her latest book follows a similar pattern. It's about a thirty-something woman called Moddie, who, following a break-up, leaves her "potentially fulfilling" job at an arts charity in Chicago and moves back to the "university town where she grew up". There, she reconnects with old friends, gets awkwardly drunk at social gatherings, and dwells on her failed relationship and her feeling of having achieved little in life.

Yes, this is the latest "sad girl" novel, said Robbie Millen in The Times. Popularised by the likes of Ottessa Moshfegh and Naoise Dolan, it's a genre that by now feels somewhat clichéd. While Butler's example contains all the usual ingredients – right down to the obligatory "masturbation scenes" – this is a sad girl novel that's "actually funny". From the absurdity of a student art installation to the "self-deceptions of therapy-talk", Butler excels at skewering the "delusions and flaws of America's creative class". Banal Nightmare is "bang on the money".

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The Echoes by Evie Wyld

The Anglo-Australian writer Evie Wyld's novels have all featured "spectres from the past" – but "The Echoes", her fourth, is the first to include "an actual ghost", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. He is Max, and he haunts the south London flat he shared with his girlfriend, Hannah, before his death. She, a writer like Max, still lives there, and so he is able to uncover some of the secrets she hid from him during his life. They largely concern her childhood on a goat farm in Australia, and the legacy of abuse passed down through her family – "horrors" that Wyld reveals "allusively", as the books moves to an "extremely moving" climax.

There is also a strand in the story concerning a reform school for indigenous children that once stood next to Hannah's family farm – a place where young girls were "stripped of their names, culture and identity", said Tobias Grey in the FT. Adding the theme of colonial violence to that of family trauma makes for a lot to handle in a little over 200 pages. Even so, the book is tight, coherent and "compulsively readable" thanks to Wyld's sure narrative control and wry humour.

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Wife by Charlotte Mendelson

Charlotte Mendelson creates great villains, said Alex Clark in The Guardian, and has outdone herself in her sixth novel with the character of Penny, an expat Australian academic who is "glamorous, worldly, beautiful" – and grotesquely narcissistic. A "compelling" study of coercive control, the novel is told from the point of view of Penny's timid younger wife, Zoe, who has been bullied for years but has decided at last to escape their marriage with their children. Zoe's plan must be executed in a day, creating a thriller-like tension intensified by the fact that their co-parents – the children's biological father and his sister – are manipulative monsters too.

The novel is "fast and furious" but beautifully observed, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Sunday Times, and full of "tiny comic images of everyday human absurdity". But despite Mendelson's consummate craftsmanship and her frequent use of flashbacks, I found it a little too relentlessly dark. Penny is "pretty much charmless from the get-go" (it's hard to imagine how Zoe could have fallen for her), and "moments of respite" are few and far between.

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Passiontide by Monique Roffey

Monique Roffey's "ambitious, poly-vocal new novel" is infused with "activist fervour", said Marina Warner in Literary Review. On the fictional island of St Colibri – a "thinly veiled version of Trinidad" – the strangled body of Sora Tanaka, a Japanese steel-pan player, is found under a tree. As the local police begin their inept investigation, we seem to be in detective fiction territory, said Kit Fan in The Guardian. Yet the novel turns into a story of protest, as the island's women, inspired by the Occupy movement in the US, camp out in the central square and bombard social media with the #AmINext hashtag. Fully showcasing Roffey's talent for "world building", Passiontide offers a "devastating critique" of male violence against women in the Caribbean.

This novel has its flaws, in particular a rather disorganised plot, said Kadish Morris in The Observer. But Roffey – winner of the 2020 Costa book of the year for "The Mermaid of Black Conch" – "does a fine job of depicting rebellion". Her book captures the "grinding frustration" involved in fighting for change in a society that pays so little attention to violence against women.

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I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson

With her "typographically disruptive debut 'little scratch' (2021)", about an office worker raped by her boss, Rebecca Watson announced herself as a "one-of-a-kind storyteller", said Anthony Cummins in The Observer – a writer both unorthodox and "compulsively readable". Her follow-up is "even better": it tells the story of twenty-something journalist Rosa, whose life is thrown into turmoil when she learns of her estranged older brother's death. The news prompts her to revisit her childhood, which was dominated by him abusing her, both "physically and psychologically" – acts dismissed by their mother as "child's play". Written, like little scratch, in fragmentary, "snipped-up sentences", this is a "chilling portrait of household dynamics gone poisonously awry".

I wasn't impressed, said Susannah Butter in The Sunday Times. While Watson's writing is again "bold", she "runs out of steam when it comes to the plot", and her central character is "actually quite boring". This novel feels "curiously cold and underdeveloped" – a case of "difficult second album syndrome".

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Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's new novel – the follow-up to her bestselling 2019 debut "Fleishman Is in Trouble" – may be largely about "inherited trauma", but it's still a "heck of a lot of fun", said Marianne Levy in The Independent. It opens in 1980, with the kidnapping of factory owner Carl Fletcher – one of the richest men in the Long Island suburb of Middle Rock. Fletcher survives, but never recovers; and the novel explores how his ordeal impacts his three children: Nathan, who's "so afraid of the world that he has insurance for everything"; Beamer, a screenwriter who churns out scripts about kidnapping; and "brainy and brilliant" Jenny, who rebels by becoming a union organiser.

This is a novel with "maximalist swagger", in the tradition of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times. But while there's much to admire, I didn't quite fall in love with it. The narrative voice, while charming, is "oddly impersonal" – and the result is that Brodesser-Akner never really makes us care about the travails of this "majestically monstrous" family.

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Rosarita by Anita Desai

Anita Desai's new book – her first in 13 years – is an "evocative" novella set in Mexico, about a young woman grappling with her mother's past, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times. Bonita, an Indian visiting Mexico to improve her Spanish, is "sitting on a shaded bench in a park in San Miguel" when a "flamboyantly dressed older woman" approaches her and asks if she's the "little girl" of her "adored" friend Rosarita. Bonita suggests she's mistaken: her mother was called Sarita, not Rosarita – and besides, she never came to Mexico. But the "older woman brushes aside these protests", and her certainty sows doubt in Bonita's mind. She asks herself, who was her mother really?

Desai is best known for her "studiously realist" novels of Indian family life, such as Clear Light of Day and Fasting, Feasting, said George Cochrane in The Daily Telegraph. Rosarita is a "more ludic tale, as taut and weird and entrancing as a story by Jorge Luis Borges". But it's strangely captivating: even aged 87, Desai remains a wonderful writer. If this is her swansong, it is "a magnificent way to go out".

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Godwin by Joseph O'Neill

The premise of Joseph O'Neill's latest novel could hardly be more "unlikely", said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. Mark Wolfe is a failed scientist who now writes grant applications for Big Pharma. When he falls out with his colleagues at the writers' co-op he belongs to in Pittsburgh, he decides to take up a proposal put forward by his half-brother – a former footballer-turned-aspiring agent – to travel to West Africa to snap up a gifted, but elusive, young footballer. O'Neill – best known for his 2008 novel Netherland – somehow "wrings edge-of-your-seat drama" from this story, with its echoes of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Godwin is an "exceptional" novel, with an "enthralling fireside quality". Wolfe is a typical O'Neill creation, said Robert Collins in The Times: a "floundering" middle-aged man. But he shares the narration with one of his co-op colleagues – an African-American woman named Lakesha – and her account of her own career crisis gives this "deceptively light comic novel a subtly profound undertow". Somewhat against the odds, Godwin is "great".

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This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

The American writer Claire Messud is responsible for some of the best-loved literary novels of the past two decades, including The "Emperor's Children" (2006), said Alex Peake-Tomkinson in The Daily Telegraph. For her seventh novel, she has drawn on parts of her own family history to tell the story of "the Cassar clan", a French-Algerian family. With its title taken from the "Seven Ages of Man" speech in "As You Like It", "This Strange Eventful History" is a richly satisfying Balzacian saga, and may well be Messud's "finest book".

The action begins in the 1940s, with patriarch Gaston Cassar – a French naval officer stationed in Greece – hastily arranging for his wife and two children to return to Algeria from Paris, as the "Germans sweep into France", said Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian. What follows is an "ambitious and compelling" tale that spans seven decades and crosses multiple continents: as Gaston and his descendants fan out across the globe, the action shifts to Massachusetts, Toronto, Buenos Aires and Sydney. Messud's brilliance lies in the way she tackles big themes – colonialism, separation, the meaning of home – while delineating her characters with "precision".

Her versatility is astonishing, said Ron Charles in The Washington Post: Messud can capture everything from the "panicked mind of a woman realising that the love of her life is an illusion", to a gossiping crowd at a 50th anniversary party. The results are "magnificent": I searched hard for flaws, but failed to find any. This is a work of "cavernous depth".

Parade by Rachel Cusk

The novelist and memoirist Rachel Cusk is "an acquired taste worth acquiring", said Kate Kellaway in The Observer. Since reinventing herself with the novel Outline in 2014, she has grafted fiction onto autobiography "with a fluency that made you wonder why more novels were not written this way". Parade, a mosaic of stories about sex, death and gender, featuring disparate artists who are all referred to as "G", is "a brilliant, stark and unsettling feat", approaching its subjects with an "intellectual intensity" rare in English fiction. "I have admired, sometimes loved, all of Cusk's books," said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. This one, however, is a plotless, introspective, humourless piece of writing "about how hard it is being Rachel Cusk". It's "simultaneously cold and histrionic, hermetic and inert, rather like that scene in Being John Malkovich where everyone has John Malkovich's face only much, much less funny". Reading Parade is "like walking over shards of broken glass". It doesn't feel "bracing", though – "it feels unnecessary".

Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru's "bracingly intelligent" new novel opens with its protagonist, Jay, "delivering groceries to a palatial home" in upstate New York, said Sandra Newman in The Guardian. The woman who answers the door is masked (it's the early days of Covid), but Jay recognises her as Alice, "his girlfriend from another life". Twenty years before, they'd been together in London, when he was an "up-and-coming Young British Artist". But she went on to marry Jay's "best friend and rival" (now himself a successful artist), while Jay's career stalled, and he fell into poverty. Now, he's sick with long Covid. Alice takes Jay in, and lets him stay in a barn on her property, said David Anderson in Literary Review. While he recovers, the novel "drifts back through time and space", to Jay's younger days in London. Kunzru "dexterously manages" this slippage: his depiction of the 1990s art scene is "superbly handled", and is all the more compelling for being "nested within" the Covid narrative. It's a novel that "confirms Kunzru's status as a master choreographer of the present moment's creeping anxiety".

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Bluestockings by Susannah Gibson

The word "bluestocking" is today a "derisive term for a female intellectual", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. But the original bluestockings – as Susannah Gibson shows in this revealing book – were a group of "brilliant thinkers determined to show that women could be every bit as rational, erudite and witty as men". The movement was founded in the mid-1700s by the "colossally wealthy" Elizabeth Montagu, who held intellectual gatherings in her Mayfair home. These were attended by both women and men; the latter included Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson and the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet – who gave the group its name after appearing in his "workaday blue woollen stockings". One is left "gasping" at the bluestockings' sheer energy, said Miranda Seymour in Literary Review. Margaret Cavendish Bentinck founded a centre for scientific investigation; another member "understood eight languages". At a time when the idea of female bookishness appalled many men, theirs was a "revolutionary" project – and Gibson's "spirited, lively and scholarly book" recognises how "remarkable" they were.

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The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota

In his previous novels, the twice Booker-nominated Sunjeev Sahota has tackled "religious radicalisation, migration and intergenerational trauma", said Sam Byers in The Guardian. His new one is similarly "challenging" in its themes: set in the Derbyshire town of Chesterfield, it explores what has become a fault line for the Left – the tension between old-school socialism and new-style identity politics. Representing the former is Nayan, a working-class divorcé in his 40s who is running to be leader of a fictional union. His main challenger is Megha, a young woman from a privileged background who tirelessly promotes racial diversity and regards Nayan as "stuck on the factory floor".

Who would have thought that a novel about trade union politics could "make for such riveting reading", asked Michael Arditti in The Spectator. That it does is down to Sahota's controlled, "spare" prose and "rich and nuanced" characterisation. Sahota's one "miscalculation" is a tendency to indulge in "metafictional flourishes". That aside, this is an "accomplished and timely political morality tale".

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The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

"It is only May," said Ed Cumming in Literary Review, "but Kaliane Bradley's 'The Ministry of Time' might well be the loudest debut of the year." Sold in 20 languages, and soon to be adapted by the BBC, it is a "gleeful romp across genres" that "might have been specially bred to leap into holiday-bound tote bags". In a near-future Britain where time travel is possible, the government has established a Ministry of Time, which recruits "expats" from different historical eras to undertake various tasks. The narrator, an unnamed British-Cambodian woman, works for the ministry as a "bridge", or expat-minder, and is assigned Graham Gore, a real-life polar explorer who perished c.1847 on HMS Terror. This is not only a sci-fi thriller, but a romcom too, said Ella Risbridger in The Guardian: despite their 200-year age gap, Gore and the narrator fall in love. Bradley has revealed that she began it as "joke" for her friends, and it does feel like it was "written for pleasure": while it tackles serious subjects, these are never at the expense of the story. The result is a "joy to read", a "summer romp that also sparks real thought".

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James by Percival Everett

Percival Everett is "no stranger to debates about the representation of race", said Marcel Theroux in The Guardian. His 2001 novel "Erasure" – the story of a highbrow African-American novelist who despairs at the way his work is received – was recently adapted for the screen as the Oscar-winning American Fiction.

Now, Everett has turned his attention to the racial politics of one of America's most hallowed works of literature – Mark Twain's 1884 classic, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Everett retells the story from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave who joins Huck on his journey down the Mississippi River. Although the novel has often been described as anti-racist, there has been "growing debate" over Jim's portrayal – with critics noting that he is one-dimensional, and that his "main function in the novel is to give Huck an opportunity to exhibit his moral growth". In Everett's version, Jim speaks in his own voice, and emerges as highly intelligent. The result is "funny, entertaining and deeply thought-provoking".

The novel's central conceit is that Jim's persona as a kind-hearted simpleton is a pose designed to make him less threatening to whites, said Jessa Crispin in The Telegraph. In reality, he can read and write, and his "slave talk" is an example of "code-switching"; when among black people, he speaks quite differently.

For most of his career, Everett's novels have been "politely passed over", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. Only now is his brilliance being recognised. "Thrilling, bold and profound", "James" "has the potential to become a classic text" – to be the book that "seals his legacy".

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You Are Here by David Nicholls

Over his hugely successful writing career, David Nicholls has specialised in exploring "so-called ordinary life – and so-called ordinary love – with humanity and humour", said Erica Wagner in the FT. His sixth novel is no exception: set over a week-long walking holiday in the north of England, it tells the story of a burgeoning affair between Marnie, a 38-year-old copy editor from London, and Michael, a 42-year-old geography teacher from York. The pair are part of a group assembled by Marnie's old friend, Cleo, a teacher at Michael's school, said Alex Preston in The Observer. Also present is the "absurdly attractive" Conrad – to whom Marnie is initially drawn – and "Cleo's taciturn teenage son Anthony". But when these others drop out, Marnie and Michael are left "alone together" – and a "cagoule-clad romance" develops that completely pulls the reader in.

Its charms were largely lost on me, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. Nicholls remains as good as ever at finding humour in the "humdrum aspects of daily life": he's "a poet of the mundane, like Larkin without the misanthropy". Unfortunately, the novel suffers from a lack of drama, because we basically know what's going to happen. "Before long, it all becomes dull." It may not be challenging or surprising, said Lucy Atkins in The Guardian. But that's not why we read a Nicholls book. Like his mega-selling "One Day", now a "global Netflix hit", "You Are Here" generates "endless nods of recognition" thanks to its "pithy textural details" and "skilful dialogue". For many, it will be a "comforting antidote to the grimness of our grim world".

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Choice by Neel Mukherjee

The UK-based Indian writer Neel Mukherjee's latest novel comprises three narratives about "21st century ethical and political dilemmas", said Tanjil Rashid in The Guardian. In the first, Ayush, a publisher living in London, struggles with his "human footprint" and the "neoliberal" outlook of his husband. In the second, Emily, an academic, becomes obsessed with an illegal immigrant taxi driver, after his cab is involved in a hit-and-run. In the third, the lives of a family in India fall apart when they receive the "well-meant gift" of a cow.

With themes including climate change, animal cruelty and the "white saviour complex", Choice "is very much of its moment", said Benjamin Markovits in The Telegraph. And much of it is "beautifully written" – but to me, it felt "maybe less of a novel and more a triptych of tales".

Actually, there is a pattern of "well-intentioned error" here that bonds the sections together, said Jonathan Lee in The New York Times. Written in "cool, calm, all-noticing prose", this is a "strangely uplifting, exquisitely droll heartbreaker of a book".

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Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan

The Caledonian Road is the main thoroughfare heading north from London's King's Cross. At its southeastern end are the leafy Georgian squares of Islington, said Tim Adams in The Observer. But just minutes away, it is flanked by gritty estates. In his long and ambitious seventh novel, Andrew O'Hagan takes his readers "deep into the lives of all the communities who live around 'the Cally'". His central character is Campbell Flynn, a Glasgow-born art historian and bestselling author who lives in Islington with his family. Flynn moves in rarefied circles – his best friend is a retail tycoon who is facing sexual harassment charges – but he becomes embroiled in a very different world when he befriends one of his students, a "radical post-colonial theorist" named Milo Mangasha. While Flynn thinks that knowing Milo will help keep him relevant, Milo has other ideas entirely. Nimbly moving between a huge cast of characters, Caledonian Road is a "pitch-perfect" Dickensian tragicomedy of manners, and an enjoyable "dispatch from the trenches of culture wars".

It's a book that "springs from scene to scene without let-up, and the energy generated carries the reader pleasurably along", said John Self in The Times. In O'Hagan's skilfully created scenes – court cases, TV shows, parties – we meet people traffickers, drill rappers, Russian oligarchs and international playboys. At its best, Caledonian Road is a Bonfire of the Vanities for the 21st century, but "all this activity comes at a cost". Some characters feel more than a little feeble – one, who is non-binary, simply "spouts woke talking points" – and the breakneck pace leaves "little breathing space".

Even though it's 650 pages long, the novel feels cramped. It's "just too much – but also not quite enough". I found it "rather brittle" and bombastic, said Lucy Scholes in the FT. The endless bon mots become exhausting – "High-minded values are merely low-minded prejudices dressed in the robes of office," one character ploddingly opines – and O'Hagan has a habit of both showing and telling. The book isn't flawless, said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph: there's too much editorialising, and most of the characters are "odious". Still, it's hard not to admire O'Hagan's ambition and chutzpah. This "dauntingly populous" novel is an "emphatically contemporary" social satire that describes the "way we live now". If it leaves a bitter taste, maybe that's because "a state-of-the-nation novel can't afford to make the state of the nation seem nicer than it is".

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The Painter's Daughters by Emily Howes

The 18th century portraitist Thomas Gainsborough immortalised his two daughters, Molly and Peggy, in half-a-dozen canvases that charted their development from "carefree girls" to "fashionable young women", said Mark Bostridge in The Spectator. In her "ingenious" debut, Emily Howes "delves beneath the surface" of the paintings to imagine what life for the sisters was like.

It is not a happy tale, said James Walton in The Daily Telegraph. Peggy, the narrator, realises when young that Molly is sometimes "not herself". As Molly (who did indeed succumb to madness as an adult) becomes "increasingly erratic", Penny becomes her sister's protector.

Marked by its nuanced understanding of family dynamics, this is a "hugely impressive" work. Howes writes "knowledgeably on everything from Georgian pigments to the tensions of sisterly love", said Imogen Hermes Gowar in The Guardian. So it's a pity that she includes a "superfluous" subplot, set 40 years earlier, which concerns the paternity of Gainsborough's wife. This "assured" book didn't need "spicing up".

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Until August by Gabriel García Márquez

Before he died aged 87, Gabriel García Márquez instructed his sons to destroy his final novel, telling them: "It doesn't work." They have decided to ignore his request, said David Mills in The Times. And so, ten years after the writer's death, we have this curious novel, with a plot that only he could have come up with. It opens with Ana, the wife of a conductor, taking her annual trip to a Caribbean island to visit her mother's grave. This year, feeling "mischievous", she decides to bed a stranger she meets in a bar. Each year after that, visits to the grave are followed by an attempt to "find a lover and have an eye-watering night of sex".

Márquez was in the early stages of dementia when he wrote Until August, and at times it shows, said Sarah Perry in The Daily Telegraph. It lacks the "inventive discursions" of his best work, and some of the writing is gauche and imprecise. Yet much of the novel is "astutely observed and beautifully conveyed", and the "cumulative effect is oddly moving". Until August may not "enlarge the legend of Gabo" – but nor does it "diminish it".

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The Lodgers by Holly Pester

This well-timed debut novel – about a "young woman's precarious experience of subletting" – begins with the narrator moving into a new flat in the small English town in which she grew up, said Chloë Ashby in the TLS. It is not her first time returning there: her life has been caught in a "desperate cycle" of moving away and then moving back. No sooner has she arrived in her new lodging – which "smells of men's shower gel and instant noodles" – than she begins obsessively imagining the life of the woman who has taken up the rented room she had just vacated, in another "similar" town.

While "nothing extraordinary occurs" in The Lodgers, it's "compelling" and "pleasingly weird". Pester is also a poet, and it "shows", said Lucy Thynne in Literary Review. Her playful sentences revel in the oddness of language, and you sense the narrator's "desire to get out of her own head". Eccentric and disorientating it may be, but this novel "holds a pressing, political truth", said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in The Observer: to stay in any kind of precarious housing, it suggests, "is to not live totally as oneself".

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Leaving by Roxana Robinson

At a performance of Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, two 60-year-olds who were briefly a couple in their youth cross paths, said Amity Gaige in The New York Times. The woman, Sarah, is divorced; the man, Warren, is married. They have dinner together, and realise that they have "unfinished business". From this premise, the American novelist Roxana Robinson builds a pitch-perfect study of "late-life love", said Joan Frank in The Washington Post. It's not a remotely sentimental or cloying tale; Robinson charts the many obstacles the couple face, including the "implacable" rage of Warren's grown-up daughter. Written in "shapely and sensuous" sentences, Leaving is a "wondrous feat".

"Affection between older people" is just one theme here, said Caroline Moorehead in The Spectator. Robinson writes superbly about the "terrifying ruthlessness of human beings", and even about dog ownership. And as its title suggests, Leaving is as much about loss as about fulfilment. With its "many twists" and bombshell ending, this is a "highly enjoyable" novel.

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Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux

In his 30th novel, the veteran writer Paul Theroux fictionalises a "relatively unexplored" period of George Orwell's life, said William Boyd in The New York Times: the five years he spent as a colonial police officer in Burma between 1922 and 1927. Eric Blair (as he then was) was fresh out of Eton, and hadn't yet decided to become a writer. Theroux presents him as a "somewhat tormented soul", who is "repelled" by the snobberies and injustices of colonial life. To console himself, he sleeps promiscuously with "local prostitutes and colonial wives". Inevitably, it's a work that owes much to speculation, but everything in it "reeks of plausibility" – and it shows that, at the age of 82, Theroux's talent remains "in remarkable shape".

Theroux's Orwell sets sail for Burma "full of romantic notions acquired from Kipling", said Nikhil Krishnan in The Daily Telegraph. The narrative charts how he loses his idealism, and in the process "acquires a sense of writerly vocation". Full of "fine" descriptive passages, Burma Sahib is "both credible as history" and an "enjoyable" novel in its own right.

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My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld

This second novel by the acclaimed Dutch author Lucas Rijneveld "belongs to a tiny, controversial subgenre", said Sandra Newman in The Guardian: "novels about child sex abuse rendered in exquisite prose". It is narrated by "Kurt", a 49-year-old vet from rural Holland, who becomes obsessed with the "troubled 14-year-old daughter of a dairy farmer". The girl, whom Kurt – her name for him – calls "Little Bird", comes from a strict religious society, and is confused about her gender identity – something Kurt exploits to become a "parental figure".

Such a novel could easily have been a "cynical" rehash of Lolita, but instead it's a "tour de force of transgressive imagination". Rijneveld's "unsettling" first novel, "The Discomfort of Evening" – about a girl coaxed into sex games with her siblings – won the 2020 International Booker Prize, said Luke Kennard in The Daily Telegraph. His follow-up is quite possibly even better. Written in run-on sentences with a "breathless cadence", it's an "extraordinary literary achievement – albeit one you might hesitate to recommend".

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Green Dot by Madeleine Gray

This "acutely witty debut" by the Australian literary critic Madeleine Gray charts the "affair between a disaffected millennial and her older, married boss", said Madeleine Feeny in The Guardian. Hera, 24, is broke, overqualified, and "living in Sydney with her father" when she starts a job as an online community moderator. Exasperated by the "indignities of office life on the bottom rung", she begins a flirtation with fortysomething Arthur – which develops into a full-blown affair. While it's hardly an original story, Gray's "parodist's ear for the cadences, platitudes and jargon of modern speech" ensures that this is a convincing, propulsive work. There's some "quite bad writing" on display in these pages, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times – as when Gray describes the feeling of being kept a secret by your lover as like "getting your period mid-hike with no tampons in sight". But the novel "shines" in other ways – such as in its subtle "exploration of the toxic relationship between boredom and lust". Ignore the "TikTok-friendly metaphors", and you'll be in for a treat.

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Day by Michael Cunningham

Many writers have responded to the Covid pandemic by "fashioning dystopias", said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. Not Michael Cunningham. "One of America's most refined stylists", he prefers, in the elegiac "Day", to "see lockdown as a microcosm of life at its most yearningly restless". The novel is focused on three "angsty New Yorkers" who share the same cramped Brooklyn brownstone. Isabel and Dan are married: she's a "harried senior photo editor at a soon-to-be-defunct" magazine; he's a failed singer-songwriter. Upstairs lives Isabel's younger brother Robbie, a gay schoolteacher who spends much of his time curating the Instagram account of an imaginary brother he nicknames "Wolfe".

Cunningham deploys the same "triptych structure" he used in his best-known novel, "The Hours", said Ron Charles in The Washington Post: "Day" unfolds in three sections, each taking place on the same day, 5 April, over three consecutive years. While it's "thinly plotted", Cunningham's exposure of his characters' inner life is "piercing", and his "truly beautiful" writing "vibrates off the page".

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Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney

This "blistering" first novel by an acclaimed Irish short-story writer anatomises "a marriage that has outrun its course", said Lucy Popescu in The Observer. The unnamed narrator doesn't know she's walking out for good when she leaves her comfortable house in a Dublin suburb one Tuesday morning, not saying goodbye to her sleeping husband and teenaged children. But, as she makes her way, by train and ferry, to Fishguard in Wales, we're filled in on her "prolonged unravelling" in writing of masterly economy and restraint.

Sweeney's spare, precise prose "gives the book a cinematic quality", said Chloë Ashby in The Spectator. Every moment in it is "observed in slow motion and high definition". It turns out that the protagonist's exit has been preceded by certain signs: "drinking alone; disliking her daughter, or at least her type; having an affair with her friend's son; opening a separate bank account in her maiden name when her mother died". But there's a core of mystery to this "deceptively simple story that tugs you along from start to finish".

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Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

Colin Barrett is a writer of "glaringly obvious talent" who has previously restricted himself to short stories, said Keiran Goddard in The Guardian. Now, for the first time, he has broadened his canvas: set in the same working class County Mayo milieu that Barrett has explored in his earlier work, "Wild Houses" is a hugely enjoyable crime caper. Gabe and Sketch are small-time crooks who are owed a few grand by a local drug dealer. In an attempt to extract the money, they abduct the dealer's younger brother, Doll, and retreat to a remote farmhouse owned by their cousin Dev. Although the story may seem slight, the book is elevated by the "deftness of its telling", and Barrett's "droll, linguistically inventive" dialogue.

There's an impressive "depth of character on display" in these pages, said George Cochrane in The TLS. Dev – a "godly-sized unit" who is dominated by his younger cousins – is memorably drawn, as is Doll's frantic girlfriend, Nicky. Mixing "action scenes with quieter moments", Wild Houses is "exhilarating", atmospheric and addictive.

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Wellness by Nathan Hill

Nathan Hill's 2016 debut novel, "The Nix" – a "time-jumping, character-hopping, consistently funny 200,000-word" doorstop – was hailed as a work of staggering promise, said Jonathan Myerson in The Observer. Nearly as long, and no less ambitious, Hill's follow-up is "equally remarkable". In part, it's an "Updikean story of marital inertia", about a couple called Jack and Elizabeth who, after 20 years together, find themselves contemplating "separate master bedrooms". Yet it's also a satire on the "many post-truths" flourishing in contemporary America – including the blandishments of the wellness industry, for which Elizabeth works. Rich in "ideas and possibilities", "Wellness" is "utterly immersive".

Hill is at his best when his "satirical prods" are directed at specific topics, said John Self in The Daily Telegraph. For instance, an account of a swingers' orgy proves funny and surprisingly affecting. But a novel this long needs gripping storylines and convincing themes – and here "Wellness" falls down. It provides "page-by-page pleasure", but works less well on a larger scale.

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Tell by Jonathan Buckley

Stories about the super-rich "tend to focus on their subjects' dysfunction", said Benjamin Markovits in The Daily Telegraph. Not so Jonathan Buckley's 12th novel, which is "just as interested in the virtues and habits" that have enabled its hero – retail tycoon Curtis Doyle – to succeed. The novel is framed as a series of interviews with Doyle's gardener, who is telling a mysterious interlocutor about Doyle's life, in the wake of his disappearance from his "palace" in Scotland. The format "yields great rewards": the gardener is free to jump from episode to episode, "without the structural impositions of a conventional plot". Packed with "wonderful" anecdotes and character sketches, this is "one of the best new novels I’ve read in a while".

Over his 25-year career, Buckley has consistently eschewed traditional narrative, said George Cochrane in the FT. His readership may have remained small as a result, but that's no reflection of the quality of his novels. "Tell" is another hugely "satisfying" work, said David Annand in the TLS: a "fascinating exploration of what it means to tell stories about our lives".

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