Literary fiction
11. ‘The Overstory’ by Richard Powers (William Heinemann, €26.59) The lives of nine characters inextricably bound up with trees – their beauty, history, science and destruction – converge across decades in this impressive paean to all things arboreal. Though its ecological themes are passionately expressed, the novel never becomes preachy, its message growing organically from its stories.
12. ‘The Only Story’ by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, €23.80) Paul is 19, Susan is married and 48. If that sounds like a scandalous beginning to an affair, try imagining how shocking it would have been in Fifties suburbia. From semi-retirement, Paul looks back on an unconventional love story that begs questions of the mind and the heart.
13. ‘Warlight’ by Michael Ondaatje (Jonathan Cape, €16.99) In the immediate aftermath of WWII, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister are left in the care of their parents’ lodger, who fills their home with colourful petty crooks and arcane experts, all of whom played vital roles in wartime intelligence – alongside their mother. An atmospheric tale of secrets and lies, it mesmerises from start to finish.
14. ‘Circe’ by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury, €23.79) The first witch in Western literature sets Homer straight as she tells her life story, from her unhappy childhood to her lonely island exile. The woman who emerges is complex and sympathetic. A spellbinding tour de force of imagination.
15. ‘The Female Persuasion’ by Meg Wolitzer (Chatto & Windus, €20.99) Witty, subtle and sparkling with intelligence, this contemporary feminist blockbuster is as entertaining as it is provocative. Its heroine, Greer Kadetsky, stumbles from her American college into a job working for a star of the women’s movement. But as she tries to make her own way in the world, she finds that the personal and the political don’t always move in harmony.
16. ‘Happiness’ by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury, €23.79) When two strangers bump into each other on Waterloo Bridge a generous, thought-provoking love story is set in motion. Attila is an eminent Ghanaian psychiatrist, and Jean an American woman making a study of urban foxes, but the novel also paints a multi-layered portrait of 21st-century London.