THE BEST NEW FICTION

We Run The Tides Vendela Vida

Atlantic £14.99 Four 13-year-old girls in 1980s San Francisco are bound together ‘like paper dolls’ after the tragic death of one of their fathers. The girls are poised between innocence and experience, and it is a testament to Vida’s great skill that she is so thoroughly rooted in their milieu. A scandal concerning one of the girls unfolds along compelling lines.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Second Place Rachel Cusk

Faber £14.99 A disturbed woman offers the use of a cottage beside her marshland home to a famous painter whose work changed her life. Far from becoming the friend she hoped for, he repays her with hostility, forcing her to question her marriage and driving her to the verge of a breakdown. Cusk overtly bases the artist on D. H. Lawrence, and though she can’t match the brilliance of his prose, this well-plotted book has something of his emotional intensity.

Anthony Gardner

China Room Sunjeev Sahota

Harvill Secker £16.99 Sahota’s beautifully crafted novel dovetails two stories from different eras. A Muslim bride in 1920s Punjab finds herself trapped in an arranged marriage and dares to dream of love and freedom. Seventy years later, a young Punjabi man, newly returned from England, must fight a lonely, uphill battle with heroin addiction. Both characters are prisoners of circumstances but, in their hunger for redemption, become emblematic of the human condition.

Max Davidson

The Trawlerman William Shaw

riverrun £16.99 Shaw’s finely drawn copper, Alex Cupidi, is on enforced leave, trying to deal with lingering PTSD following a traumatic case. But trouble is never far away from her home on the wild Dungeness shore. Murder and fraud, fishing and family all come together in a terrifically atmospheric thriller mixing a twisting plot with a considered meditation on the lasting effects of close contact with violence.

John Williams