THE BEST NEW FICTION

Free Food For Millionaires Min Jin Lee Apollo, €18.55 The heroine of this vivacious saga is Casey Han, an Ivy League graduate seeking to make her way and find love in Nineties Manhattan. However, Casey’s progress — like that of her sister Ella — is complicated by her heritage – born in Korea but raised in the US, she is estranged from her conservative, working-class parents. With its focus on mores and money, Min Jin Lee’s debut is reminiscent of Jane Austen. Indeed, there are two episodes in which an exchange of gifts reveals a gulf in understanding that could have been penned by Austen herself, so well are they judged. The Burning Girl Claire Messud Fleet €20.98 From their second week at nursery school in New England, sturdy, darkly ringletted Juliet and white-blonde, bird-boned Cassie are as tight as twins. But as teenagers, their backgrounds come to the fore and the different futures envisaged for them by their teachers mean that Juliet spends her evenings studying while Cassie parties with the jocks. Then Cassie goes missing. Lingeringly evocative, this is a heartfelt coming-of-age tale whose insights – into girlhood especially – are braided with mystery and menace.

Hephzibah Anderson Home Fire Kamila Shamsie Bloomsbury €20.50 Sisters Isma and Aneeka are increasingly worried about their brother Parvaiz, who has gone to Syria to fight for Isis, in homage to the jihadist father he never knew. But a chance encounter with Eamonn, the son of a British Muslim home secretary, seems to offer them a way forward. At a time when Europe’s Muslims find themselves increasingly under the spotlight, Shamsie’s seventh novel, deservedly long-listed for this year’s Man Booker, is a timely rejoinder to all the cant and prejudice. An intelligent, thought-provoking and beautifully written novel about family, identity and divided loyalties, it elegantly echoes Sophocles’s Antigone. Simon Humphreys