From an intense tale of two brothers to a stunning Booker winner – the very best fiction of the year.

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Launched late in the year to the feverish fan hoards was the fourth instalment in the so-called "Rooneyverse". In a slight departure from the norm, Intermezzo's protagonists are two men: Peter, 32, a talented but troubled barrister, and his 22-year-old chess-prodigy brother, Ivan, both working through grief and family tensions following their father's recent death. Elsewhere, however, there were plenty of Rooney's familiar beats to be enjoyed – tangled relationships, frequent sex, philosophical debates and deceptively simple but assured prose. "Intermezzo is perfect – truly wonderful" writes The Observer, "a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney's richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements." Its review concludes by asking: "Is there a better novelist at work right now?" While The New York Times' critic was enchanted, writing: "Intermezzo is Sally Rooney with a bit more butter and cream. Yes, please, waiter. Call me a fool for love, but this oft-jaundiced reader found this meal to be discerning, fattening, old-school and delicious." (RL)

Flint Kill Creek by Joyce Carol Oates

If you like your fiction noirish and nerve-shredding, look no further than the latest offering from US literary powerhouse Joyce Carol Oates, the author of more than 60 novels. In Flint Kill Creek, her characters face various macabre situations within a collection of a dozen short stories, with titles including Bone Marrow Doner, The Phlebotomist and Happy Christmas. It is a "grimly satisfying" collection of tales, says Publishers Week. "In each case, Oates's prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid." The protagonists of each tale are bewildered by what is happening around them, thrown off balance, and face chilling, unhappy outcomes. "Yet, in thrall to a master manipulator of words," says the New York Journal of Books, "readers will grit their teeth and turn another page in this collection. The stories in Flint Kill Creek are unforgettable – although many may wish they could forget." (LB)

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

"From a tale of great pain" The New Yorker writes of Small Rain: "… a rare kind of story - it becomes one so difficult to render that it is thought to be impossible: a story of ordinary love, ordinary happiness." The US writer Garth Greenwell is known for his first two novels, What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), and as a great writer of bodies and sex. With Small Rain, he turns his attentions to another corporeal concern – that of illness and pain. The novel centres on a poet, who is struck down one day with a searing pain and near-fatal illness that confines him first to the ER and then the ICU, as the Covid-19 pandemic rages. "This is a frightening, penetrating, ultimately illuminating novel…", writes The Observer. "Reading it you feel as though you were holding a single grain of rice in your hand which, upon examination under a microscope, reveals itself to be engraved with the history of the world." (RL)

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Rachel Kushner's fourth novel Creation Lake tells the story of Sadie Smith, a 34-year-old US undercover agent who infiltrates a radical eco-activist commune called Le Moulin in a remote region of France. Having insinuated herself into the anarchist group, she then becomes intrigued by an elderly philosopher, Bruno, and his rejection of modern life. Kushner draws the reader in with her "dead-on language" and the "threat-alert atmosphere of the world she imagines", according to NPR. "Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the soiled plastic wrap of noir," it says, and "Kushner is a dazzling chronicler of end times". The Times Literary Supplement calls the novel "a mesmeric, cool and deeply intelligent exploration of (among other things) early man's relationship to time and space. It is huge in scope, finely mapped by Kushner." (LB)

All Fours by Miranda July

"Gutsy, funny, wise, chaotic, dirty, panic-inducing", writes Vulture of July's second novel, which follows an unnamed 45-year-old semi-famous artist, as she embarks on a road trip to escape her partner and son. Instead, she winds up in a nearby motel where she proceeds to redecorate her room and start a wild affair with a young, aspiring hip-hop dancer. Described by some as a "perimenopause novel", All Fours documents the chaotic, all-encompassing period of a woman's mid-life, rarely featured in literature, with wry humour and explicit detail. "July's characteristic dry observational style can turn with equal ease to insouciant aphorism or to the lyrical eloquence with which she writes the extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex that takes the narrator to extremes of her own inwardness while forcing new kinds of contact and honesty", writes The Guardian. Vulture's critic describes All Fours as: "one of the most entertaining, deranged, and moving depictions of lust and romantic mania I've ever read". (RL)

Bright I Burn by Molly Aitken

Molly Aitken's 2020 debut The Island Child – about the power and danger of a mother's love – was a critical triumph. Her second has been equally well received, and is based on the true story of the first Irish woman convicted of witchcraft, Alice Kyteler (1280-1325). Bright I Burn portrays a formidable but humane heroine with a love of power, sex and wealth, who gets through four husbands, all of whom come to a suspicious end – whereupon an ambitious bishop condemns her as a witch. Alice's voice is interspersed throughout by the commentary of a chorus of judgmental villagers. "The novel moves through the decades in sharp, poetic vignettes," says Publishers Week. "It adds up to a fiercely intelligent and often surprising examination of a woman's choices and their consequences." The Irish Times, meanwhile, describes Bright I Burn as "mesmerising", and "an imaginative, very stylishly written and entertaining book". (LB)

The Safekeep by Yael Van der Wouden

Shortlisted for The Booker Prize this year, Van der Wouden's sharp and........

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