Smash hit

Recalls the childhood of Max Morden, and his youthful encounter with Mr and Mrs Grace one summer at the shore

The Times’s verdict: “Meticulous and sensual”

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Howards End transferred to an upmarket American university

The Times’s verdict: “On Beauty owes a lot to a lot of writers — Forster, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, even Keats — but it’s clear that Zadie Smith knows why she wants these debts, and also that she intends to repay them”

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

The tale of two men in turn-of-the-century Britain, Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, a solicitor from Birmingham. Their lives come together during “the Great Wyrley Outrages”, when George, wrongfully convicted of animal mutilation, seeks the help of his friend

The Times’s verdict: “The narrative runs pacily through the well-drawn characters and tackles uncomfortable issues”

A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry

Willie Dunne, a Dubliner who signs up to fight for the Allies in the First World War, finds his loyalty tested when he is forced to fight his countrymen in the Easter Rising

The Times’s verdict: “Suffers occasionally from figurative excesses . . . but these quibbles are forgotten in the true, visceral music of Barry’s prose”

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Appears to start simply with pupils at a happy boarding school but evolves into a disturbing story of cloned human beings in which Ishiguro investigates the nature of the span of life and its purpose

The Times’s verdict: “Destined to become a classic A-level text . . . an emotion-shattering page-turner”

The Accidental by Ali Smith

Astrid, 14, breaks the boredom of a summer holiday by filming every dawn, until the arrival of the mysterious Amber.

The Times's verdict: "Smith's prose is nearly poetry, jazzy yet precise"

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