‘When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.’ She is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, and the I speaking here is Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

Eley Williams’s debut novel The Liar’s Dictionary expands on the interest in words and wordplay demonstrated in her 2017 prize-winning collection of short stories.

‘People have all kinds of families.’ This one is fractured and shadowed, but the pages ultimately burst full, love after love after love.

In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux goes back to 1958 and her first sexual experience … What comes of looking back is an essay-memoir that brims with meaning.

We know, more or less, what’s going to happen. What matters is how. Hilary Mantel’s choice to write in the present tense brings Tudor London shockingly close, in all its strangeness.

That surprise of connection – of “poetic coincidences” – is the logic that governs Sara Baume’s handiwork.

Old Food is offal, the verbose spawn of artist Ed Atkin’s exhibition of the same name, ‘written in blurts throughout’.

Pet, ‘wings loud with righteousness’, is a striking creation, but it is Emezi’s depiction of love which will stay with you.

The strength of Macardle’s writing lies in her attention to detail, so that what seems like unassuming, unpretentious prose strikes deeply.

A question opens Mary Jean Chan’s debut poetry collection, Flèche. ‘Who will read this slim volume of mine, and with what preconceptions?’

Shortlisted for the Booker prize, Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport is a modernist masterpiece, a single sentence stream of consciousness.