Best novels: top books to read this year

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.

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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".

Mantle 320pp £20 

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".

Sceptre 368pp £20; The Week Bookshop £15.99

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".

Atlantic 320pp £18.99 

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".

Faber 656pp £20 

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".

Orion 384pp £20; available on The Week Bookshop

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".

Viking 144pp £13.99; available on The Week Bookshop

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".

Granta 224pp £11.99; available on The Week Bookshop

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.

Magpie 336pp £13.99; available on The Week Bookshop 

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.

Hamish Hamilton 400pp £15.99; available on The Week Bookshop

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".

Faber 352pp £16.99; available on The Week Bookshop

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.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 384pp; available on The Week Bookshop

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".

Fourth Estate 288pp; available on The Week Bookshop

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".

Weidenfeld & Nicolson 224pp; available on The Week Bookshop

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.

Jonathan Cape 272pp; available on The Week Bookshop

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.

Picador 624pp; available on The Week Bookshop

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".

David Nicholls is appearing at the Stratford Literary Festival, which runs from 1 to 5 May. Readers of The Week will receive a special discount on festival tickets, simply use the code WKSLF24 when booking. Visit www.stratfordliteraryfestival.co.uk