The Best New Fiction of the Year

A bookish friend said to me recently, “It’s been a terrible year for books.” Well, up to a point. The sheer volume of new novels, together with the difficulty of seeing through the thickets of bandwagonesque-trend-centred publishing, mean that it’s easy to feel oneself submersed in substandard fiction. But at The Critic we are here to help. It’s time for our annual guide to the best new fiction of the year, which excludes those worthy candidates — including Tom Crewe’s The New Life, Jacqueline Crooks’s Fire Rush and Deborah Levy’s August Blue — already reviewed in these pages.