Another welcome short story from Clare Keegan published in a handsome little hardback. Like the others Faber have published in this format, the story has a resonance far beyond what's on the page - there is deep social history in her writing. This story is about the misogyny of the Irish male, as Cathal and Sabine fall in and out of love. Just brilliant, but if I had to choose, I'd say that Small Things Like These is her best...

In Ascension is a truly breathtaking piece of work. It's one of the best things I've read for some time, and a novel which restores ones faith in the genre. It takes the reader on an unexpected and constantly surprising journey. Set in a near future, it tells the story of a young woman from the Netherlands who excels in marine biology - the reader learns a lot about algae and its potential as a food source - and her journeys on a research ship to the south Atlantic, and to the Mojave Desert and beyond.

I found this mysterious, perplexing novel unsettling, but frustratingly opaque. It's about a women who moves to an isolated northern country, where her ancestors were from, and her brother has returned to. She's needed as his caregiver. The locals don't welcome her, in fact they seem disturbed by her presence; and inexplicable events occur. The country seems to have a violent and contentious history, which she may be seen as complicit in. It's a lyrical novel, almost a prose poem, and there are moments of great power and intensity.

An epic novel of contemporary Nigeria, in which two families, one more privileged than the other, collide in violence. It describes powerfully how easy it is to be drawn into a path towards inevitable disaster. Across a large cast of well-drawn and plausible characters, the events of the novel play out convincingly and movingly, and give readers an insight into Nigerian life with all of its colour, vibrancy and passion.

Be Mine is the fifth book that Richard Ford has written following the life of his great creation Frank Bascombe. Over the 40 year chronicle of Frank's life and thoughts, Ford has described America during that period in a way that few other writers, if any, have done. It's a masterful creation, and this new book is perhaps the most moving of the series, as Frank grapples with advancing age, and the necessity of caring for his son who has a diagnosis of a terminal degenerative illness. Their exchanges are both hilarious and bleak.

This is a shattering novel of the experience of slavery in America, through the narration of a slave girl, Annis, sold into slavery in New Orleans, and taken to a sugar plantation in Louisiana. It's a very dark book, as it needs to be. It's imbued with almost tangible grief, appallingly true despite being fiction, written in the style of a myth or a legend. Annis has a dignity and a sense of hope, despite the cruelty she suffers every day, and her conversations with spirits lend a mystical edge to the novel. The ending is inevitable, but cryptic.