THE BEST NEW FICTION

The Living Sea Of Waking Dreams

Richard Flanagan Chatto & Windus €18.99 Middle-aged Australian architect Anna already has plenty on her plate, from bushfires and stroppy siblings to a sick mother, when one of her fingers mysteriously falls off. Other limbs follow. Bookerwinner Richard Flanagan is never dull and, if the blend of magic realism with more conventional topics such as ageing and environmental catastrophe is occasionally awkward, his prose has a pyrotechnic brilliance.

Max Davidson

The Beloved Children

Tina Jackson Fahrenheit €12.99 Chrysanthemum, Rose and Orage are three young girls thrown together in a dance troupe entertaining Brits in the 1940s. Backstage, they find themselves taken under the wing of a waspish wardrobe mistress and her mysterious Russian colleague and drawn into a world where no one is quite as they seem. Beguiling and warm-hearted, this gloriously magical tale has shades of Angela Carter.

Kitty Marlow

Mrs Death Misses Death

Salena Godden Canongate €21 Mrs Death, an elderly black woman, is world weary and tired of the invisibility of her job – being death itself. She begins to tell her life story to a writer, who is struggling with mental health troubles and grief. Dark at times – with compelling stories about miscarriages of justice, murder and racial oppression – it is nonetheless celebratory and lifeaffirming, aglow with love, fortitude and compassion.

Eithne Farry

The Survivors Jane Harper

Little, Brown €19.99 Australia’s Jane Harper may well be the finest thriller writer to emerge in recent years. The Survivors is set in a Tasmanian coastal town whose unforgiving sea has claimed many victims. Kieran Elliott blames himself for the death of his brother in a sailing accident years earlier. On a rare return visit home, he finds himself drawn into a murder investigation. Past and present begin to overlap in this compelling, beautifully characterised mystery.

John Williams