THE BEST NEW FICTION

Just Like You

Nick Hornby

Viking €17.55

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 remains 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 €16.99

Cleeves’s much-loved 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 countryhouse 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 €16.99

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 but shares a gradually revealed underlying premise.

Neil Armstrong

The Evening And The Morning

Ken Follett

Macmillan €24.99

This 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. Hunker down for an earthy barrage of page-turning incident.

Anthony Cummins