Ann Cleeves, Susanna Clarke, Nick Hornby and Ken Follett: 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