THE BEST NEW FICTION
Sea Of Tranquility Emily St John Mandel Picador £14.99
Readers will have to be on their toes to follow this freewheeling sci-fi yarn. At different points in the novel, we are in 1912, 2020, 2203 and 2401. A female character called Vincent takes some getting used to. But Mandel is certainly an accomplished writer and, whether she is describing the adventures of a young English migrant to Canada or imagining a writer from a moon colony travelling to Earth for a book tour, she has plenty of fun along the way.
Max Davidson
The Young Pretender Michael Arditti Arcadia Books £12.99
William Betty was an acting prodigy who attained rock-star status in the early
19th Century, fawned on by aristocrats and politicians alike. Then, in his mid-teens, he fell spectacularly out of fashion. What went wrong? Arditti’s well-wrought novel imagines him aged 20, trying to make a comeback; as he does so, he wrestles with the gaps that trauma has left in his memory. Above all it’s a vivid, highly detailed portrait of life in rumbustious Regency London.
Anthony Gardner
Villager Tom Cox Unbound £16.99
Cox’s wonderful first novel hopscotches through two centuries in a moorland village in the West Country. From teenage shenanigans in the 1990s to the memories of a widower living in a doomy near-future, the book’s threads gather around the legacy of a Californian folk singer who visited after the Summer of
Love. One chapter unfolds as dialogue with a search engine; others are narrated by the moor itself. A rich potpourri that keeps us busy enough not to worry about what it adds up to.
Anthony Cummins
No Less
The Devil Stuart MacBride
Bantam £20 MacBride’s
Scottish crime novels pull the genre in two seemingly incompatible directions at once – bringing both comedy and horror into play. No Less The Devil is no exception. His latest protagonist, a traumatised copper called Lucy McVeigh, is investigating a series of particularly ghastly serial murders. She manages to keep the nightmare at bay with the blackest of humour, until the case takes a quite extraordinary turn. Certainly this year’s most bizarre thriller.