Crooked Heart – Lissa Evans

As regular followers may remember, I absolutely loved Old Baggage’s Mattie Simpkin. Published as a prequel after Crooked Heart, it provided readers with Mattie’s story in 1928. Crooked Heart, although the first of the two novels, moves forward a decade and Mattie, very sadly, is now suffering with dementia and ‘looking after’ a godson, Noel. …

Hot Stew – Fiona Mozley

Fiona Mozley's new novel is excellent. It's very different in tone to her outstanding debut, Elmet, but excellent all the same. Hot Stew has a large cast of characters inhabiting Mozley's Soho, a landscape she builds from open fields in a virtuoso fast-forward motion in a matter of paragraphs. The buildings, the visitors, the inhabitants, …

Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's new novel picks up on some of the ideas and concerns visited in Never Let Me Go, but that novel now feels like something of a rehearsal for Klara and the Sun. In his latest novel, Ishiguro has perfected the limited-perspective narrative style and given us a marvellous new invention in Klara, an Artificial …

The Lying Life of Adults – Elena Ferrante

'Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.' A more condensed narrative than the rather sprawling Neapolitan Quartet, Elena Ferrante's new novel is a classic bildungsroman with an interesting gothic flavour. As with the Quartet's main figures, our new narrator, Giovanna, is focused on her growing awareness …

The Death of Francis Bacon – Max Porter

Once you’ve read The Death of Francis Bacon, you can’t help feeling that only Max Porter could have tackled the imagined thoughts of this violently visual painter. As already seen in Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Porter’s style suits the noisy, graphic style of the painter himself. In a way, the layout …

Advent – Jane Fraser

There's a special sort of joy in reading a novel set in a landscape you love and know well. Better yet if the novel is beautifully written by an exciting new voice in literature. And Jane Fraser's debut novel, published by Honno Press, is just that. Even if you don't know the Gower before you …

Grief is the Thing with Feathers – Max Porter

This has been on my radar since I found and fell in love with Lanny, Porter's second book. And man, this one has undone me. It's unlike anything else I've read, a verse narrative exploring the aftermath of loss, and the route grief takes when your bereavement counsellor is a large, rude, trickster crow. It …

Summerwater – Sarah Moss

I'm going with Fiona Mozley on this: Sarah Moss is definitely one of the best writers in Britain today. I loved her historical Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children, and last year's Ghost Wall was also excellent. I'd venture, however, that Summerwater tops them all. In this, her latest, she spears the frets …

Small Pleasures – Clare Chambers

The beautiful cover aside, and I did buy it purely because of that cover, this is such a good read. Based, initially at least, on a real story from 1955, in which a woman comes forward to claim a virgin birth, Chambers has given us a compelling and warm-hearted story that is both a mystery …

Tea is So Intoxicating – Mary Essex

To my shame, this is the first time I’ve read Ursula Bloom in any of her many authorial guises. As Mary Essex, Bloom wrote at least eight books (that I can find) and here provides us with a somewhat spiky rural village comedy. Not many of her characters are particularly likeable, and she has a …