THE BEST NEW FICTION

Just Like You Nick Hornby Viking £16.99

There’s plenty that is deliciously familiar in Hornby’s first new novel in six years, including agile riffs on music, football and single parenthood, along with a wryly observed North London backdrop. Yet it’s unmistakably of-the-moment: the plot not only straddles the Brexit vote, it also shines a searching light on race relations through an unlikely central romance between Lucy, a 42-year-old white teacher, and Joseph, an aspiring DJ who’s black and 22. Sharp, charming and upbeat.

Hephzibah Anderson

The Darkest Evening Ann Cleeves Macmillan £18.99

Cleeves’s much-loved Northumbrian police detective, Vera Stanhope, is grumpy, dishevelled and middle-aged but not to be underestimated. This latest case opens when a young mother is found dead in a snowdrift, close to a manor house owned by Vera’s wealthy cousins. What follows is less a country-house mystery than a countryside one, as she struggles to unravel tangled links between taciturn rural folk. A thoroughly engrossing thriller, let down a little by a somewhat contrived denouement.

John Williams

Piranesi Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury £14.99

Piranesi lives in ‘the House’, a vast – possibly infinite – series of huge halls. He spends his time exploring it and cataloguing its statues. His favourite is the Faun, of whom he dreamed once: ‘standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child’. Who is Piranesi and what is ‘the House’? Clarke’s beautiful and bewitchingly strange fantasy is very different from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke’s debut novel, but shares a gradually revealed underlying premise.

Neil Armstrong

The Evening And The Morning Ken Follett Macmillan £25

This fan-serving prequel to Follett’s 1989 medieval blockbuster The Pillars Of The Earth hustles us through Dark Ages Britain as seen through the eyes of a cleric, a noblewoman and a talented young boat-builder, whose dreams of eloping with his older married lover are brutally dashed when the Vikings come to town. Any quibbles over whether this is great art are strictly to be left at the door; instead, hunker down for an earthy barrage of pageturning incident.

Anthony Cummins