Ruth Shaw runs a tiny bookshop in Manapouri. This isn't a Shawn Bythell like memoir about life in the bookshop, although it does feature amusing stories of characters who visit, it's more a moving, charming and chatty memoir about the fantastically colourful life Ruth led before she owned the bookshop. She was born in the 1940s, and has lived a very full life in NZ, Australia and at sea around the South Pacific and Indonesia, and writes with a great deal of charm and emotion, it's funny, eccentric and extremely moving. This will be extremely well, deservedly so.

Nick Hunt has walked and written about most of Europe. He recreated the great walk of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and wrote the excellent Walking The Woods and The Water (2014). Now he sets off to walk in and experience 4 very different and unlikely European environments. He begins in Scotland's Arctic, the Cairngorms; then Poland's jungle, the last European remnant of primeval forest on the Poland Belarus border; then Spain's desert, in fact Europe's only true desert, in the south of Almeria; and then finally Hungary's steppe, the Great Plain Hortobagy.

This superb psychological thriller, set in and around the Ruahine Range, is narrated by Emily Kirkland, a successful children's book illustrator who returns from London to care for her father who is suffering from dementia. A neighbouring woman disappeared 25 years previously, and Emily gradually starts to realise that her father knows more about it than she ever knew. He's struggling with his memory, however, and Emily is also squabbling with older siblings about their father's care, and his will and what will happen with his estate after his death.

This brief, late career novel based on Conrad's own experiences introduces the concept of crossing the shadow line between the naivety of youth and fully adult life. It's become a much-used term, but in Conrad's novel it concerns a young man who finds himself skipper of a sailing ship, for the first time, on a journey from Bangkok to Singapore. The ship is becalmed for some weeks, with almost all of the crew ill with 'tropical fever', the narrator is forced into an epic and largely sleepless journey in which he changes forever.

This sensational novel deservedly won this year's Booker Prize. It is an incredibly powerful, intelligent, moving and resonant novel, set in South Africa over a 40 year period, starting just before apartheid ended. It follows a family of 3 children, dropping in on them roughly every 10 years on the occasion of a family funeral. The title refers to a promise made at the beginning of the book, by the matriarch just before her death, to reward the family's black housekeeper by giving her a house on their farm.

Another masterpiece from this Booker (1989) and Nobel (2017) Prizewinning author, Klara and the Sun is thematically similar to his Never Let Me Go (2005), in that they are both set in the near future, in a similar but not quite familiar world. Klara is an AF, an android-like companion for a teenage girl, and she is the narrator of the novel. This allows for an oblique, naive view of humanity which Klara struggles to understand, but as the novel progresses, the reader comes to a greater understanding of what is going on in the world than she does.