China Miéville, author

I was sideswiped by Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child . A brilliant, strange book that challenged me in the most exhilarating way, with its fractured language and dream-cinema visions, the sense it bestowed of walking through a corridor full of echoes. Echoes of a less elliptical but no-less political kind haunt Jordy Rosenberg’s astounding Night Night Fawn . I guess you could call it a family novel? But it’s at least as much about fascism as it is about the family – as well as about unsettling linkages between the two. And for horrors and rage in a nonfiction register, Jonas Marvin’s The Breaking of the English Working Class is an indispensable – and beautifully written – essay on decades of structural, economic and psychic violence. The feeling it provoked in me brought to mind John Berger’s phrase “undefeated despair”.

The Rouse by China Miéville is published by Picador (£35). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com .…