This superbly inventive and clever thriller is set in near-future Wellington, with a climate crisis in play globally, and social and economic disruption in a New Zealand flooded with 'wealthugees'. The narrator is a genius slacker, who is anarchic and unreliable, but smart and well drawn. She behaves appallingly and hilariously, but the book isn't being played for laughs. It's deadly serious, tense, claustrophobic and exciting, and takes the reader places you won't expect. A brilliant and unsettling read, and too short at 400 pages.

Set mostly in Oakland, mostly amongst the urban Native American community, this powerful novel tells in alternating chapters the stories of a dozen or so disparate characters, who are destined to overlap in a tragic climax at the Bog Oakland Powwow. It's a darkly energetic novel, exhilarating and exciting as it drives the reader towards an inevitable, excruciating finale. The many characters are all convincingly drawn, and not regularly seen in American fiction. This is Orange's first novel, published when he was in his mid-thirties. He's one to watch, an exciting discovery.

This novel has two distinct and very different parts, the first in the summer of 1986, two friends from a small Scottish town head to Manchester to attend a music festival featuring the big bands of the time: Jesus and Mary Chain, New Order, The Smiths, The Fall, Magazine. O'Hagan captures the energy and optimism of this group of young men, at the climax of their youth at a magical time in history. We then jump forward to 2017. Life is different now, overhung with the shadow of death.

Inventive as always, this new novel by Jon McGregor is also thrilling, hypnotic and meditative. It unpicks the ongoing ripples of a single event, as this author does so well. It's in three sections, as the title suggests. The first is set in Antarctica, in which a terrible storm hits a field research expedition, the ramifications of which are explored in the later two sections, back in Britain. It's incredibly moving and authentic, reminiscent of Ian McEwan's Saturday in its forensic detail of stroke and aphasia, and the work needed to recover.

In this dreamlike narrative, an elderly man lies awake, remembering his life and past tragedy, in snatches of imagery, conversations and internal monologue. It's mysterious and enigmatic, confusing, but also written with elegance and poetry, and is very evocative of the American South West.

Light Perpetual is on the 2021 Booker Prize Longlist, and is a dazzlingly original work by one of Britains most inventive contemporary writers. It reminded me of William Boyd's Any Human Heart, Paul Auster's 4 3 2 1, and Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin. It's an epic novel, spanning 65 years from 1944 to 2009, following 5 characters from young children, and visiting them each for a day in 1949, 1964, 1979, 1994, and finally 2009. They interweave each others lives as they deal with the travails of the 20th Century.