Saba Sams’s unsettling, full-throated Send Nudes (Bloomsbury) captures girls and young women on the brink of change Jem Calder’s Reward System (Faber) smartly anatomises contemporary life in the relentless glare of the smartphone and Gurnaik Johal’s We Move (Serpent’s Tail) delicately traces relationships and disconnections across a British-Punjabi community. Three notable debut short-story collections introduced fresh, contemporary new voices.

And Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan (Rough Trade Books) punctures the bubbles of social media in a fierce tale of obsession and power dynamics. Jon Ransom’s The Whale Tattoo (Muswell), focusing on a gay working-class man in watery rural Norfolk, is lyrical, atmospheric and brutal by turns. The book delves deep into faith, violence, addiction, ambition and love with power and grace. An Olive Grove in Ends by Moses McKenzie (Wildfire) portrays a young Black man’s struggle to define what success might look like in a Bristol neighbourhood in the grip of gentrification. Three hard-hitting debut novels shone out. And in Amy & Lan (Chatto), set on a ramshackle farm commune, Sadie Jones gives us a wonderfully achieved child’s-eye view of messy family interactions and the up-close life-and-death drama of the natural world. Douglas Stuart followed Booker winner Shuggie Bain with a tough and tender story of family dysfunction and first love in Young Mungo (Picador). Namwali Serpell’s second novel, The Furrows (Hogarth), brilliantly dramatises the psychic dislocations of grief over a lifetime through the story of a woman haunted by the memory of her younger brother, who died under her care in childhood. Ross Raisin has quietly become one of Britain’s most interesting novelists: A Hunger (Cape) explores the conflict between ambition and duty as a chef takes on a caring role when her husband develops dementia. There are no laughs, however, in Sarah Manguso’s chilling Very Cold People (Picador), an uncomfortable, deeply impressive account of how silence, snobbery and repression in a New England town allow the poison of abuse to trickle down the decades. Rebecca Wait’s I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (Riverrun) is a very funny, emotionally wise story of sibling rivalry and difficult mothers. Charlotte Mendelson skewers narcissistic control in The Exhibitionist (Mantle), a darkly witty portrait of an artist on the slide who has spent decades squashing the life and creative energies out of his wife and children. Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (W&N, translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel), in which a “clinic for the past” treats Alzheimer’s patients, plays with ideas of history and nostalgia to explore Europe’s 20th century and current confusion with wit and warmth. Maggie O’Farrell’s follow-up to Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait (Tinder), is a glittering Renaissance fable of a girl caught up in Italian aristocratic intrigue, and Kate Atkinson is on deliciously acerbic form in Shrines of Gaiety (Doubleday), exposing the underbelly of London nightlife in the roaring 20s. Catherine Chidgey’s Remote Sympathy (Europa) is an excellent investigation of communal guilt and obliviousness to Nazi atrocities, while in Trust (Picador) Hernan Diaz deconstructs capitalist excess and the illusion of money through different perspectives on the story of a New York financier. Shehan Karunatilaka won the Booker prize with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida(Sort Of), a blistering murder-mystery-cum-ghost-story set amid the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil war that similarly focuses on the effort to preserve ordinary life in the face of sectarian violence. Based around a dangerous affair between a young Catholic woman and an older Protestant man, it combines gorgeously direct and acute prose with an incisive eye for social detail. Other standout novels illuminating the past include Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses (Bloomsbury), set in Northern Ireland during the 70s. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Best online address book 2022