THE BEST NEW FICTION

Lessons Ian McEwan

Jonathan Cape £20

McEwan’s longest novel yet charts the life of likeable if unheroic Roland, a tennis coach, piano bar player and aspiring poet, whose birth in 1948 and Libyan childhood echo the author’s own. Over some eight decades, his personal dramas are shaped by global events from the Cuban missile crisis to Covid. It’s baggy – almost daringly so, given McEwan’s other work – but lingeringly affecting.

Hephzibah Anderson

Stone Blind Natalie Haynes Mantle £18.99

The latest of Haynes’s imaginative retellings of classical myths grapples with Medusa, though the story is all but unrecognisable. Haynes writes from perspectives as varied as the snakes that make up Medusa’s hair, the Gorgon monsters that guard her as a baby, and the many gods of Olympus. With its unending innovation Stone Blind is feminist, funny and thought-provoking.

Francesca Peacock

The Unfolding A.M. Homes Granta £20

Set in the aftermath of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, Homes’s latest is a timely discourse on the fracturing of US democracy. The Big Guy, a wealthy donor to the Republican Party devastated by the result, forms a cabal intent on restoring conservative American values. For all its pleasures – not least the superbly calibrated dialogue – the satire largely fails to ignite.

Simon Humphreys

The Ink Black Heart Robert Galbraith

Sphere £25

By now anyone familiar with the Cormoran Strike series will have made up their mind about these sprawling mysteries with fiendishly complex plots. Fans will be as entranced as ever, but new readers might not want to begin with this thousand-page epic, which sees our hero caught up in the murderous jealousies of an online clique obsessed with a morbid cartoon show.