From a post-apocalyptic dystopia to a brilliant time-travel debut, a far-future take on humanity and more

Juice
Tim Winton, Picador

There is no shortage of post-apocalypse dystopias, but Winton’s hefty eco-disaster is a cut above. An unnamed man and a mute young girl flee pursuers across the blasted landscape of future Western Australia. Looking for refuge in an abandoned mine, they are taken hostage by a stranger armed with a crossbow. The man narrates the story of his life, Scheherazade-style, in an attempt to stop this person killing them both – the tension that builds across this long novel as to whether the strategy will save them is brilliantly worked. As the night unfolds, we get the full scope of what it means to live in a ruined world, learning how the epochs of the past declined from The Hundred Years of Light to The Dirty World and The Terror. The architects of the Earth’s collapse, descendants of the corporate polluters from our time, now live in redoubts and bunkers, and part of the story follows “the Service”, a paramilitary group who hunt them down. The prose is gorgeous, as you would expect from Winton, and a passion for our beautiful planet – alongside anger at what corporations are doing to it – burns red-hot throughout.

An AI police detective, a Georgian fortune teller and Indian mobsters make this year’s list of notable crime fiction

Given this year’s headlines, it’s unsurprising that our appetite for cosy crime continues unabated, with the latest title in Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die (Viking), topping the bestseller lists. Janice Hallett’s novels The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels , which also features a group of amateur crime-solvers, and The Christmas Appeal (both Viper) have proved phenomenally popular, too.

Hallett’s books, which are constructed as dossiers – transcripts, emails, WhatsApp messages and the like – are part of a growing trend of experimentation with form, ranging from Cara Hunter’s intricate Murder in the Family (HarperCollins), which is structured around the making of a cold case documentary, to Gareth Rubin’s tête-bêche The Turnglass (Simon & Schuster). Books that hark back to the golden age of crime, such as Tom Mead’s splendidly tricksy locked-room mystery Death and the Conjuror (Head of Zeus), are also on the rise. The late Christopher Fowler, author of the wonderful Bryant & May detective series, who often lamented the sacrifice of inventiveness and fun on the altar of realism, would surely have approved. Word Monkey (Doubleday), published posthumously , is his funny and moving memoir of a life spent writing popular fiction.