China Dream by Ma Jian

Ma Jian’s novels have been banned in his native China for 30 years and he has been hailed as ‘China’s Solzhenitsyn’. His latest book, China Dream, also contains some of the zip and vigour found in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian visions. This must be one of the liveliest novels about brainwashing ever written.

Ma Daode, the protagonist, is the director of the China Dream Bureau. Chillingly, such a body exists and was tasked with promoting Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream of National Rejuvenation’ shortly after he came to power in 2012.

Ma Jian takes this concept one stage further and has Ma Daode work on ‘developing a neural implant, a tiny microchip which we would call the China Dream Device’. This is to be inserted into citizens’ brains to delete memories and dreams.

Land of the Living by Georgina Harding

Georgina Harding’s four previous novels – The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, Painter of Silence and The Gun Room – have all explored, in different territories, what trauma does to the psyche. Land of the Living is no exception. The Second World War has ended and a young British officer, Charlie Ashe, has returned to England to marry Claire. His experiences as a soldier in the Battle of Kohima – one of Britain’s bloodiest battles – and the subsequent months he spent lost in the jungles of Assam, are now firmly in the past.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver trained as biologist before she became a novelist and she has repeatedly shown her desire to anatomise society in her fiction. In her bestselling novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), she examined the impact of missionaries in the Belgian Congo and in her more recent novel, Flight Behaviour (2012), she took on climate change. In her latest novel Unsheltered, she turns her attentions to the recently disenfranchised middle class in contemporary North America.

Willa Knox is a woman under siege. Having strived for years, she newly finds herself a member of the precariat. The magazine she edited and the college at which her husband, Iano, taught both fold at the same time. The couple move into a wreck of a house she has inherited in Vineland, New Jersey, which they hope might be the answer to their prayers before realising it is so damaged as to be almost unliveable in.

Melmoth by Sarah Perry

Sarah Perry has followed her Victorian debut The Essex Serpent with Melmoth, which begins in near-contemporary Prague. It is easy to forget that the setting is 2016, however, not least because our heroine, forty-two-year-old Helen Franklin, has no interest in present-day pleasures. She views the Prague that tourists enjoy as “a stage set, contrived by ropes and pulleys”. In fact, she has no interest in pleasure of any kind and is governed by self-denial. Perry is skilled at suggesting a whole life in a phrase – Helen is introduced to us with “her neat coat belted, as colourless as she is, nine years worn”.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Normal People, Sally Rooney’s extraordinary second novel has already been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and at 27, she could be the youngest writer ever to walk away with the prize. Anyone who has read her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), will hardly be surprised as they will know that she writes with breath-taking fluency. She wrote 100 000 words of her first book in just three months, by often writing for 17 hours a day and prior to this was a European debating champion. This might partly account for why the dialogue in her novels is so startlingly good.

First Novels

Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, £12.99) is the haunting story of a concert pianist whose wrist is fractured in a train crash. On a whim, he uses his compensation money to buy a house that he has only seen in pictures. If that sounds dull, this might be because it is hard to convey the shocking accuracy of Kilalea’s prose, which, ultimately, is what makes this novel so riveting. The absolute correctness of the vocabulary she uses makes one realise how pretentious and unnecessary the language in much contemporary fiction is.