From Stuart MacBride to Tom Cox, Emily St John Mandel and Michael Arditti, the best new fiction 

Sea Of Tranquility

Emily St John Mandel                                                                          Picador £14.99

Readers will have to be on their toes to follow this freewheeling sci-fi yarn. At different points in the novel, we are in 1912, 2020, 2203 and 2401. A female character called Vincent takes some getting used to.

But Mandel is certainly an accomplished writer and, whether she is describing the adventures of a young English migrant to Canada or imagining a writer from a moon colony travelling to Earth for a book tour, she has plenty of fun along the way.

Max Davidson

The Young Pretender

Michael Arditti                                                                         Arcadia Books £12.99

William Betty was an acting prodigy who attained rock-star status in the early 19th Century, fawned on by aristocrats and politicians alike. Then, in his mid-teens, he fell spectacularly out of fashion. What went wrong?

Arditti’s well-wrought novel imagines him aged 20, trying to make a comeback; as he does so, he wrestles with the gaps that trauma has left in his memory. Above all it’s a vivid, highly detailed portrait of life in rumbustious Regency London.

Anthony Gardner

Villager

Tom Cox                                                                                                   Unbound £16.99

Cox’s wonderful first novel hopscotches through two centuries in a moorland village in the West Country.

From teenage shenanigans in the 1990s to the memories of a widower living in a doomy near-future, the book’s threads gather around the legacy of a Californian folk singer who visited after the Summer of Love

 One chapter unfolds as dialogue with a search engine; others are narrated by the moor itself. A rich potpourri that keeps us busy enough not to worry about what it adds up to.

Anthony Cummins

No Less The Devil

Stuart MacBride                                                                                           Bantam £20

MacBride’s Scottish crime novels pull the genre in two seemingly incompatible directions at once – bringing both comedy and horror into play. No Less The Devil is no exception.

His latest protagonist, a traumatised copper called Lucy McVeigh, is investigating a series of particularly ghastly serial murders. She manages to keep the nightmare at bay with the blackest of humour, until the case takes a quite extraordinary turn.

Certainly this year’s most bizarre thriller.

John Williams