The story of one unhappy family told from multiple perspectives. Paul Murray is a confident, stylish writer: he convincingly evokes a teenage girl’s rage, a boy’s fear, a father’s secrets and a mother’s disappointments and grief.

This historical novel centres on a butcher’s claim to be the heir of an English aristocrat. It focuses on an ex-slave who backs his story and on a woman who, fascinated by the case, becomes a writer. Slavery, populism and women’s roles are serious themes in an often funny book.

A tale of an affair gone sour between a middle-aged male academic and a young female student in East Berlin in the dying days of the German Democratic Republic. It brilliantly weaves the personal with politics and history and does a fine job of unsettling the reader.

Set in a single home in the forests of Massachusetts, the interconnecting stories of this enthralling novel span four centuries. It offers a timely musing on what and who are lost to history.

The winner of this year’s Booker prize is a cautionary tale of war, parenthood and loss. Tender and terrifying at once, it follows a mother-of-four trying to keep her family together in an imaginary dystopian Ireland, where the government has succumbed to authoritarianism and is trampling on civil liberties.

A skilful and disquieting exploration of motherhood. In limpid, brisk prose, Claire Kilroy describes the difficulty of completing everyday tasks when accompanied by an infant, including making breakfast and going to the supermarket.

After her mother dies, Gopi, the 11-year-old narrator, takes up the game of squash at the urging of her bereft father. A slim, subtle debut novel of grief and growing up that conjures a powerful panoply of emotions in an elegant style.