Love by Roddy Doyle

It is not clear at the outset of Roddy Doyle’s latest novel, Love, what kind of love he is aiming to explore – though the opening to this dialogue-heavy novel, in which two men meet in a Dublin pub, certainly zips along promisingly. Davy has returned from England to Dublin, where Joe still lives, to visit his elderly father. Davy is aware of self-consciously trying to blend in during this visit: “‘Shite’, ‘grand’, ‘Jaysis’ – I packed the words with my toothbrush when I was coming to Dublin for a few days.” Doyle, as ever, has much to offer about masculinity, love and family. That said, 327 pages is quite long for a novel where the main action is two men going for a drink, and one’s enthusiasm flags towards the end. The sheer relentlessness of listening to two men talk becomes wearing.

It also isn’t always clear which of them is speaking – which might be a fatal flaw in a novel that revolves around a single extended conversation, but Doyle has just about enough élan to pull it off.

Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the novelist Katie Kitamura, and their two small children. He received a £1.25m advance for his first novel, The Impressionist (2002), while Booker Prize-winning novelist Aravind Adiga recently said: “The book I wish I’d written? Whatever Hari Kunzru is publishing next.”

Life, then, appears to have been relatively kind to Kunzru. So why did he feel the need to delve into the cesspit of the alt-right for his latest novel, Red Pill? “I wanted to write a book about privacy and surveillance initially, then I got a residency in Berlin,” he says. “I was in Wannsee, which is a sleepy suburb. There’s a lake and it’s not the hipster Berlin of Mitte or Kreuzberg. It was the middle of winter, so it was kind of bleak, dead.

“On the other side of the lake, visible from my desk, was the Wannsee Conference house, where they plotted the Final Solution. It became clear I had to set something in Berlin, then it got wrapped up with the alt-right. I’ve been online since 1992 and I’ve always dug around in the subcultures of the internet.”

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Avni Doshi’s first novel, Burnt Sugar, has a memorable opening: “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure”. And its narrator, Antara, may be justified in this attitude, given that her mother later says to her, “I always knew that having you would ruin my life”. The novel has drawn praise – and gained a Booker Prize shortlisting – for its somewhat taboo exploration of being mothered and mothering. Antara is an artist in Pune; Tara is the mother, and she is losing her memory. Her daughter resents this because it means there is “no way to baste her in guilt” over the past. There is plenty Antara thinks her mother should feel guilty about: the period, for example, that they spent during her childhood living in an ashram and begging on the streets, before Antara was sent to a boarding school run by draconian nuns who made her hold her soiled bedsheets over her head in the gymnasium for everyone to see. Antara reflects, “the only reality that remains from that time are feelings and ideas, and whether I authored them or they were placed within me is impossible to know”.

The Mission House by Carys Davies

Carys Davies has followed her highly praised debut, West, with another jewel of a novel. Hilary Byrd is a man dogged by “bad days” who seeks refuge in Ooty, a hill station in south India much prized by the British soldiers who first rode up there in 1819 and decided to build “a little corner of England. A place to rest in, out of the heat, and be comfortable and cool.” The evocation of a 1950s British idyll in India is so persuasive that it comes as a shock to read the word “email” – this, it transpires, is a novel set in the present day.

“The gingerbread eaves of the post office” in Ooty soothe Byrd, who is haunted by the memory of an elderly man calling him a “bald cunt” in the library where he’d worked for 25 years in south-east London. His only company now is Jamshed, the rickshaw driver who transports him around the small town, the Padre and his adoptive daughter, Priscilla, who live next to Byrd. Priscilla was born with no thumbs and a short right leg; when the Padre suggests he must find a good match for her, Byrd’s heart leaps at the idea this could be his destiny.

Islands of Mercy by Rose Tremain

Rose Tremain has followed her masterly The Gustav Sonata with an altogether different novel. In 1865, Clorinda Morrissey, a 38-year-old woman from Dublin, arrives in Bath and sells a ruby necklace in order to set up Mrs Morrissey’s High Class Tea Rooms. Mrs Morrissey believes that ‘the future was going to be perfumed with raspberry jam and freshly baked scones and fragrant lemon cake’.

The tea rooms also, however, once open, become the scene of Jane Adeane — a highly skilled nurse — rejecting a proposal from Dr Valentine Ross, her colleague at her father’s surgery. Jane has achieved a near-mythic status as a nurse in Bath and ‘was described as “The Angel”, or sometimes as “The Tall Angel” or “The White Angel’ or, more frequently, as ‘The Angel of the Baths”’. Jane flees to London after Dr Ross’s proposal to stay with her unconventional aunt — an unmarried painter called Emmeline Adeane and is soon seduced by a married Italian beauty, Julietta Sims.

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

Emma Donoghue’s publishers might regard it as a mixed blessing that her latest novel is set during the 1918 flu pandemic. While she can’t be faulted for topicality, it seems unlikely that many people will want to spend more time than they need to thinking about a deadly virus. This would be a shame as, for the most part, The Pull of the Stars is a beautifully modulated historical novel. There is also the comfort – for most of us – of how much more likely we all are to survive the current emergency than anyone on the 1918 Dublin maternity fever ward, the setting for Donoghue’s 13th novel. For a small cast, the death count here is high.

As anyone who has read Donoghue’s internationally bestselling novel Room – inspired by the grotesque Josef Fritzl case – will know, she is quick to draw the reader in. After only four short sentences, we can already smell the “dung and blood” of the Dublin streets as nurse Julia Power cycles to work at an understaffed hospital in the city centre. Donoghue’s prose is visceral, and the sense of peril in the cramped, tiny ward is compelling.