One of the most original collections to emerge from the booming new wave of next generation poets – and winner of the Ted Hughes Award - The Perseverance turns Raymond Antrobus’s experiences, growing up as a deaf British Jamaican, into strikingly lyrical verse. Navigating the spaces between sign language and speech, he creates a world of new and shifting communication as a filter for keenly evoked memories of his childhood and growing up.

An acclaimed New-Zealand poet and essayist, Ashleigh Young turns her expressive and inventive eye to her own upbringing for her first non-fiction work. A coming-of-age story, told through a collection of essays, Can You Tolerate This? oscillates between fragmented, personal experiences and fleeting glimpses of influential lives and histories. What emerges is a strange and wonderful perspective on finding oneself, exploring and interpreting the wider world and the process of writing itself.

Over the course of the last fifty years, there has been a staggering and unexpected rise in the number of people undertaking the spiritual tradition of pilgrimage. After many years of mental illness, Guy Stagg made the extraordinary decision to become one of them, travelling from his home in Canterbury to Jerusalem. A record of his journey and an investigation into the pull of pilgrimage itself, The Crossway is a nuanced and affecting chronicle of travel and self-discovery. Already earning comparisons with Patrick Leigh Fermor, Stagg’s book is a classic work of travel literature: beautiful, meditative and illuminating.

Redolent of the scope and influence of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile spans much of the nineteenth century, bringing to life, with startling immediacy, a period of intense social and political upheaval. Using the form of a fictional found manuscript, Alice Jolly portrays this world in flux through the eyes of Mary Ann, a maid servant in the Five Valleys of Gloucestershire. Asked to set down her ailing master’s history, Mary Ann soon finds her own story bleeding into his and a very different voice emerging. An original historical novel, which offers a fresh, convincing and compelling perspective on ordinary lives facing unprecedented change.

The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2018. Anna Burns presents a darkly wry - but disquieting – coming of age in her third novel Milkman. The setting is a thinly-disguised 1990s Belfast; the drama focuses on its nameless, 18-year-old narrator and her affair with the somewhat sinister ‘Milkman’, a much older married man allied with the paramilitaries. ‘Milkman is both a story of Belfast and its particular sins but it is also a story of anywhere,’ noted the Irish Times. ‘It reminded me of China Mieville’s The City and the City where identity, names and seeing the Other are contentious acts. Milkman shares this level of ambition; it is an impressive, wordy, often funny book.’

The drama of the everyday is at the heart of Diana Evans vibrant third novel. Opening on the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration, Ordinary People captures the lives of two couples, navigating the landscape of black and mixed-race middle class domesticity, parenthood and the unravelling confines of the settled-for life. Evans prose is sparklingly light on its feet and brings pathos and humour to an insightful examination of modern life so filmic it even has its own soundtrack. As the Guardian says, Ordinary People is an accomplished novel, brought to life by ‘the sheer energy and effervescence of Evans’s funny, sad, magnificent prose.’

One of the most original collections to emerge from the booming new wave of next generation poets – and winner of the Ted Hughes Award - The Perseverance turns Raymond Antrobus’s experiences, growing up as a deaf British Jamaican, into strikingly lyrical verse. Navigating the spaces between sign language and speech, he creates a world of new and shifting communication as a filter for keenly evoked memories of his childhood and growing up.

Tommy Orange’s hometown of Oakland, California provides the backdrop to a powerful debut novel about a contemporary Native American community. Already the subject of a host of critical acclaim in the US, There, There eschews the all-too-familiar clichés of Native American experience, replacing them with a much more complex and multi-layered portrait of individual and collective lives shaped and shattered by centuries of oppression. Above all it is the choral effect of Orange’s polyphonic work that stands out; building to a profound sense of the possibility of hope and compassion amidst the darkness.

How far might someone go to answer a mystery? That question lies at the heart of Carys Davies’ accomplished debut novel. Widowed and grieving, Pennsylvania settler Cy Bellman abandons his 10-year-old daughter to undertake a perilous, thousand-mile journey west, in search of a monster thought lost to time. Brilliantly evoking the landscape of early nineteenth-century America, West balances the tale of a man on a mission against the backdrop of the displacement of Native American peoples. Told with dark humour and a keen eye for tragedy, on both an intimate and epic scale, West is a triumph.