#FictionBookS

A strong field of nominees has produced a slate of fiction you’ll want to spend time with – and will be surprised by

Chetna Maroo’s novel Western Lane follows an 11-year-old girl coping with the loss of her mother, but it never quite catches emotional fire

Elaine Feeney returns with How to Build a Boat, about a neurodiverse schoolboy, but the purchase and power of her debut are missing

Siân Hughes’s debut novel, from the indie Indigo Press, is a rare gem that fully deserves its Booker longlisting, and your attention

Lauren Groff’s new novel, The Vaster Wilds, is a rivetingly tense 17th-century tale of a girl bidding for freedom from a colonial fort

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, deservingly longlisted for the Booker, circles intelligently around an Irish family mired in friction

In Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s superb Booker-longlisted debut, an autistic woman sees a pair of interlopers inveigle their way into her life

This season, spy thrillers and crime stories are sweeping us from 19th-century Essex to the grit of California at its worst

Mona Awad’s sinister fourth novel, Rouge, follows a young skincare-obsessed woman who has lost her mother in suspicious circumstances

Sally Nicholls's latest historical novel Yours from the Tower is a rewarding read for youngsters that never feels like a dull lesson

Benjamín Labatut’s brilliantly cerebral new novel spans eight decades, (at least) three geniuses, and the dawn of the technological age

Paul Lynch’s Booker-longlisted dystopia imagines the creep to totalitarianism through one family’s tortuous experiences

Some say there’s nothing this young star can’t do, but her first book, Nineteen Steps, a flat and repetitive wartime romance, disproves that

Boris Pasternak faced this plight in 1934. Ismail Kadare’s novel, A Dictator Calls, imagines the full range of what might have happened next

Nominally set in revolutionary France, Adam Thirlwell’s protagonist meets Napoleon and Marie Antoinette in this knotty novel of ideas

Rose Cleary’s deft debut novel, How to Be a French Girl, swerves from middle-of-the-road to darkly off-piste, with plenty of wit en route

As proved by I Hear You’re Rich, Diane Williams’s fiction, long beloved by those in the know, is joyful, unnerving and linguistically spry