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The flighty Rose is in America to track down Dr Wheeler, the only witness to a terrible deed from her youth. She requires the help of Washington Harold, a character created in the spirit of A Confederacy of Dunces' Ignatius J Reilly, who has own clandestine need to track him down. Beryl Bainbridge's final novel, which she was on the verge of completing when she died, is more than just a poignant coda to her inimitable writing career; it's a rough-edged road trip pastiche, wrapped around the historical event of Robert Kennedy's assassination, that stands comparison with her finest achievements. - Jonathan

If I didn't know better I would think Andrea Cremer was a pseudonym for a collective of authors because Nightshade, with its werewolves, witches and warlocks has the intense forbidden love of Meyer's Twilight, intelligent storytelling akin to Sarah Rees Brennan, the compelling imagination of Cassandra Clare, all brought together with the humour and relationships of Rachel Caine's Morganville characters. If, like me, you're a teen horror fan you will love Nightshade. Those that aren't genre aficionados will still love Nightshade. So get reading. - Neil

This novel is a breath of fresh air in the young adult paranormal genre because 1) this story is not romance-led and 2) the main character isn't female with tortured yearnings. The Replacement has a brilliantly realised male lead in Mackie Doyle that embodies the adolescent angst of not fitting in with peers, of not belonging with their family, that their differences make them a freak. Except that for Mackie all those feelings are fact. Yovanoff has written a story that is new and exciting, and created a richly painted 'otherworld' that is as colourful, abstract and esoteric as a music video for a Marilyn Manson/Lady Gaga collaboration. I seriously, seriously enjoyed this novel, and since I am in the same company as Lauren Kate and Maggie Stiefvater in that enjoyment, I think it's pretty safe to say you will too! - Neil

The islanders live by their own creeds, trade with the tall men their only contact with the mainland. Just one family has travelled to settle there, but eldest daughter Morgan must wait until she's twenty-one to learn the secrets told only in the women's sanctum, the Weaving Rooms. Meanwhile, Mary's little brother Barney has been snatched by a trader, like many boys before, and she seeks justice from the Thrashing House, a mysterious place said to have grown from the island's last tree. From the islanders' subtle creole to their myths of sea and sky and earth, Richards has nurtured a remarkable community, their home glimpsed in the sea-mist like a new Avalon. Angela Carter or Laura Esquivel would have been proud of this. - Jonathan

Quinn Smith was the boy hero of the world-famous Triplets and Quinn stories. Now he’s a man, middle-aged and living under a roundabout. Quinn spent years living anonymously, hidden from a world obsessed with a fiction based on his family. When his existence is exposed, he must confront the characters of the life he had tried to escape. Morrall’s novel is a witty and well-observed account of reinvention, but also a tragic, sometimes sinister fable about clinging too closely to nostalgia. With a relentless attention to detail, packed with secrets and revelations, this is a book to be explored as much as enjoyed. Morrall invites us to abandon ourselves to the thrill of discovery as we join Quinn on his final adventure, and it’s a very welcome invitation. – Emily

After the bewildering death of Gary Speed, this William Hill prizewinner is all the more poignant, shedding light upon the 'supermen' of Sport who have to hide their shortcomings and exposing a disease which is rife but shamefully buried in this high-performance world. An artful telling of Robert Enke's struggle expressed through words drenched in sorrow, which still manages to retain a stance of composed reverie throughout. This also covers the reunification of Germany and how that affected its citizens in a myriad of physical and emotional ways. A worthy winner of 2012's top sports book prize. - Benjamin

Dinner-party guest Miles escapes the chafing around the table and locks himself in his hosts' spare room. While his seclusion stretches from days to weeks to months, Smith's wilfully tangential narrative skips from Miles' competition-winning teenage essay on the future to the hospital bedside of a elderly woman visited each year on the anniversary of her daughter's death by the boy she forbade him to see. A structural cousin to Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad and evidently borne out of Smith's passion for the short-story form, the novel revels in the alchemy of unlikely pairings and brings a wide-eyed originality to the well-worn theme of the attitudes and antipathies of the well-to-do middle class. - Jonathan

In 1980s Wisconsin, young Hayat is entranced by the Qu'ran's stories of devotion introduced to him by his mother's friend Mina, who has fled a cruel husband in Pakistan. But when Mina falls in love with Nathan, a Jew, Hayat finds himself caught between the avowed secularism of his father and the savage anti-Semitism of the local mosque. Ayad Ahktar's portrait of Islam is often harsh, putting the dogmatism of traditional elements into sharp relief but also allowing little sentiment for Mina's touching belief in the elegant simplicity of submission to divine will. But read from a post-9/11 perspective, the novel portrays the cultural clash between Islam and the West as fuelled by extreme views of all sorts, rather than any fundamental incompatibility. - Jonathan

Just as in his memorable debut, God’s Own Country, Ross Raisin takes a troubled character and pushes him over the edge. Mick is a Glaswegian shipbuilder made redundant, then widowed when his wife contracts a lung disease from the poisons on his clothes. Robbed of all purpose to his life, he heads for London but is soon just another of the capital’s considerable homeless population. It’s a sobering and powerful story of a man of traditional values, unable to share his pain with his family, who slips through the cracks of modern life into anonymity and despair. - Jonathan

Simon Lelic’s second novel presents the reader with unlikely villains and unlikelier heroes. The Facility is a dystopian depiction of a UK in which civil liberties have been undermined to a point where the government is able to incarcerate members of the public when the country is threatened by an epidemic of a previously unknown disease. Lelic’s characters are not exemplary or even admirable, merely ordinary citizens who find themselves caught up in the narrative’s increasingly nightmarish coils. The story is told from three perspectives: that of one of the men imprisoned, who is less hero than tragic victim; that of a journalist trying to help free him, who is no Bond or Bauer but somewhat precocious, naïve and uncomfortably aware of his own moral failings; and that of an increasingly conscience-stricken official charged with running the facility itself. As a thriller, The Facility fits comfortably within the recent slew of books, films and miniseries which revolve around the investigation by intrepid individuals of government corruption or conspiracy. In a reversal of the traditional trope based around threats to state security from rogue outside elements, in such plots the villain is now the state itself and the heroes those who find themselves beyond its pale. The book stands out for being resolutely unlurid, deriving its shock and horror from the ruthlessness of the agents of government and the grim degree to which the ‘good’ characters, as well as the reader, become aware of their powerless fragility before the state. Lelic’s prose is spare and concise, fast-paced but unfolding its horror in a measured inevitable flow, with the occasional surprising line of economically descriptive beauty. The Facility is an accomplished example of its type and, in a world increasingly sceptical of the intentions of government, thoroughly a book of our time. - Rhian

Oxford academics Raymond and Beatrice embark on an affair fuelled by their research into a possible link between their respective specialities of Virginia Woolf and Friedrich Nietzsche. Their liaison takes them to the Wales of Raymond's childhood, near where Woolf found inspiration for To The Lighthouse. A side-plot involves Beatrice's estranged husband, Walter, whose international construction company is playing a dangerous political game with its expansion into the Middle East. Named after the subtitle to Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, the book wears its scholarship on its sleeve, even with the author's caveat regarding her liberties with the facts. Reflecting its modernist influences, it is a novel of ideas and aesthetics, exquisite in its descriptive passages, but it is driven by a tension between the cerebral and more fundamental emotional needs. - Jonathan

A man lives a subsistence existence alone on an island. Ten years before, he had been exiled by his people, who could no longer stomach the brutal measures he took to ensure their survival. One day the leader of his people's former enemy washes up on the beach, alive but mute, and he knows this is his signal to return, to make peace with his past. A bright and original debut; if you like Paul Auster or Ali Smith or Magnus Mills, this is one for you. - Jonathan

I've never before experienced a writer so in command of character and its function. This deftly crafted treatise upon memory distortion and denial is the antithesis of a vanity piece, wherein not a single paragraph is wasted. The Sense of An Ending is tragic and oppressive in tone yet everything has its own space. - Benjamin

A hotel maid travels across the Mediterranean and on to Germany in search of her child and the hotel guest who fathered him, her journey seen through the eyes of those who encounter her on the way. The indignities she endures for no more than snatched hours with her son make this a moving evocation of the power of a mother's love and a chastening reminder that there is a human story behind every transient face on the road. - Jonathan

Quick off the mark with a 'credit crunch' novel, Faulks' first foray into contemporary fiction, following the huge success of historical novels such as Birdsong and his revitalisation of the Bond franchise with Devil May Care, is an articulate commentary on the fears of all of us for the future. From a world of prosperity where, to quote Douglas Adams, "no one was really poor, at least no one worth speaking of", suddenly we all became vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the global economy.

A Week in December is set just after the collapse of Northern Rock and follows the fortunes of seven very different characters as their lives are changed fundamentally by events in the wider world. From the hedge fund manager still determined to pull off the deal which will set him up for life to the disaffected Muslim youth drawn to fundamentalist principles, the embittered book reviewer to the tube train driver literally going round in circles, this is a thoughtfully rendered portrait of a society forced to confront uncomfortable truths and make hard choices. - Millicent.