From Ann Cleeves’ engrossing thriller to Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, a sharp novel by Nick Hornby and Ken Follett’s latest, this week’s best new fiction
The Darkest Evening
Ann Cleeves Macmillan £18.99
Cleeves’s much-loved police detective, Vera Stanhope, is grumpy, dishevelled and middle-aged but not to be underestimated. This latest case opens when a young mother is found dead in a snowdrift, close to a manor house owned by Vera’s wealthy cousins.
What follows is less a country-house mystery than a countryside one, as she struggles to unravel tangled links between taciturn rural folk. A thoroughly engrossing thriller, let down a little by a somewhat contrived denouement.
John Williams
Just Like You
Nick Hornby Viking £16.99
There’s plenty that is deliciously familiar in Hornby’s first new novel in six years, including agile riffs on music, football and single parenthood, along with a wryly observed North London backdrop.
Yet it’s unmistakably of-the-moment: the plot not only straddles the Brexit vote, it also shines a searching light on race relations through an unlikely central romance between Lucy, a 42-year-old white teacher, and Joseph, an aspiring DJ who’s black and 22.
Sharp, charming and upbeat.
Hephzibah Anderson
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury £14.99
Piranesi lives in ‘the House’, a vast – possibly infinite – series of huge halls. He spends his time exploring it and cataloguing its statues. His favourite is the Faun, of whom he dreamed once: ‘standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child’.
Who is Piranesi and what is ‘the House’? Clarke’s beautiful and bewitchingly strange fantasy is very different from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell but shares a gradually revealed underlying premise.
Neil Armstrong
The Evening And The Morning
Ken Follett Macmillan £25
This prequel to Follett’s 1989 medieval blockbuster The Pillars Of The Earth hustles us through Dark Ages Britain as seen through the eyes of a cleric, a noblewoman and a talented young boat-builder, whose dreams of eloping with his older married lover are brutally dashed when the Vikings come to town.
Hunker down for an earthy barrage of page-turning incident.
Anthony Cummins