Fiction

The Quarry
Iain Banks
Little, Brown, £18.99
Iain Banks was already writing this novel about a middle-aged man raging against terminal cancer when he received his own diagnosis earlier this year. He pulls no punches in an honest portrait of adult compromise and disappointment. But a tenderly awkward teenage narrator and Banks's customary wit and fury carry this final book from one of the UK's most imaginative and best-loved writers.

Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate, pbk £9.99
It's won virtually every prize going, but don't let the hype put you off; Bring Up the Bodies is a masterpiece of historical ventriloquism centred around one of the most notorious episodes of English history, the fall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel's central character, Thomas Cromwell, has thus far been Anne's ally; but how will he respond to power shifts at Henry VIII's court?

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
Mohsin Hamid
Hamish Hamilton, £14.99
This follow-up to The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the story of a poor village boy's rocky rise to bottled-water magnate in a subcontinental megalopolis. Cunningly modelled on business self-help books and written in the second person, it's fast, funny and clever: a propulsive, eye-opening read.

Life After Life
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, £18.99
England, 1910. A baby is born to die – and then born again, and again, and again … Atkinson shuffles a dazzling array of alternative existences for her heroine, who might just change the fate of the world, in her most ambitious book so far. Shortlisted for the Women's prize, the novel portrays a changing England alongside the horrors of war, with Atkinson's trademark wit and flourish.

NW
Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, pbk £7.99
Childhood friends Leah and Natalie have stayed geographically close to the north London estate they grew up in, but their circumstances – and their relationship – have changed dramatically. Whether it's for the better, whether you can leave behind your background, and why you might want to, are Smith's themes, worked out rigorously, delicately and minutely in a novel of ambitious structure and scope.

A Delicate Truth
John le Carré
Viking, £18.99
There's a righteous fury igniting Le Carré's later works. Here his targets are the privatisation of intelligence-gathering, the hypocrisy of New Labour and, as ever, the ethical poverty of realpolitik as he sets out the staging of a failed counterterror operation in Gibraltar. The political and technological landscape has changed beyond measure since the cold war, but the power-brokers are as smooth and deadly as ever.

All That Is
James Salter
Picador, £18.99
Salter's protagonist, Philip Bowman, does not live an exceptional life, and that's what makes All That Is an exceptional novel; it narrates the repetitive minutiae and the social and historical context that make up an individual subjectivity. Salter's achievement, as with many great writers, is to leave us wondering how he did it – and what "it" is, exactly.

Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate, £20
Over 13 years, Ifemelu has built up a solid life in the US, not least because of her incisive, witty blog about matters of race and culture. But homesickness has led her back to Nigeria, where she will also find her childhood sweetheart, Obinze. Will their wildly different experiences mean they have nothing to say to one another?

Sweet Tooth
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, pbk £7.99
Nice, middle-class Serena Frome is undoubtedly brainy, but it's her beauty that wins her a job in the boys' club that is MI5 in the 1970s. Her mission is to recruit – without his knowledge – an up-and-coming young novelist and turn him into a useful mouthpiece for the establishment. McEwan has fun sending up both literature and espionage, and the twisty narrative will enthral fans of Atonement.

Where'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple
Phoenix, pbk £7.99, out 4 July
This light relief on the Women's prize shortlist has warmth and bite in equal measure. Brilliant, troubled Bernadette – a visionary architect who's started a family but lost the plot – is a fantastic creation, and Semple's picaresque comedy, told through letters, emails and even a live blog, skewers the absurdities of American privilege while drawing a heartfelt portrait of mother-daughter love.

The Guts
Roddy Doyle
Jonathan Cape, £12.99, out 8 August
August sees the return of Jimmy Rabbitte, star of Doyle's much-loved novel The Commitments. Now in his late 40s, Jimmy has a wife, four kids – and bowel cancer. Music still drives him, especially when he's reunited with two of the original Commitments, in a warm comedy about mortality, nostalgia, friendship and family life.

Dark Eden
Chris Beckett
Corvus, pbk £7.99
The winner of this year's Arthur C Clarke SF award is an ingenious spin on origin myths. The 532 inhabitants of Eden, a sunless planet whose light and warmth come from geothermal trees, are all descendants of two crashed astronauts: plagued by inbreeding, they scrabble for survival while their memories of Earth become more warped. A linguistic and imaginative tour de force.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
Headline, £16.99
Compared to the sprawling mythologies of Sandman or American Gods, this is a much tighter, leaner fable, with autobiographical nuances from Gaiman's Sussex childhood. A lonely, bookish boy must battle a monster in a book that summons both the powerlessness and wonder of childhood, and the complicated landscape of memory and forgetting.

The Hive
Gill Hornby
Little, Brown, £12.99
Who's in, who's out, who's top mum? This barbed comedy about school-gate politics delivers on the hype: it mercilessly sends up middle-class smuggery, but it's also an affectionate portrait of how the world can shrink when you have small children, with genuine insights into female friendship. If, as with Bridget Jones's Diary, there are romantic formulae it is bound to follow, there are plenty of unfettered laughs along the way.

The Flamethrowers
Rachel Kushner
Harvill Secker, £16.99
Kushner's second novel comes loaded with recommendations and it's easy to see why. It's the story of Reno, an artist in her 20s, obsessed with speed and motorcycles, and her accidental foray into the world of 1970s Italian radicals. Highly unusual and written with great seriousness and potency.

Instructions for a Heatwave
Maggie O'Farrell
Tinder Press, £18.99
The gloomier and damper this summer becomes, the more we might yearn for 1976, when a heatwave melted the tarmac and left the earth parched. O'Farrell recreates the sweltering, oppressive atmosphere and tosses into it the abrupt disappearance of an expat Irish paterfamilias that throws his wife and three adult children – their relationships already strained – back into one another's orbit.

Last Friends
Jane Gardam
Little, Brown, £16.99
Terence Veneering was a wonderful character in Gardam's acclaimed novels Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat; now, in the closing instalment of the trilogy, he's given a leading role. Gardam's story of the august lawyer's precarious origins and rise to professional prominence glitters – as does the enduring tale of his rivalry with Old Filth himself.

MaddAddam
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, £18.99, pub 29 August
The post-apocalyptic trilogy that Atwood began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood reaches its conclusion in August, returning us to the world of the Crakers, benign bio‑engineered humanoids, the religious environmentalists God's Gardeners and our original protagonist, Snowman. It's a complex, brilliantly realised world – and there's a handy summary of the first two books.

Almost English
Charlotte Mendelson
Mantle, £16.99, pub 15 August
Combe Abbey, a public school rooted in tradition, might seem the perfect destination for a teenage girl desperate to escape her claustrophobic home life; but a half-Hungarian Londoner is unlikely to pass without notice. Meanwhile, back at home, how are her idiosyncratic family coping without her? Mendelson's account of imperfect escape is as witty as it is painful.

May We Be Forgiven
AM Homes
Granta, pbk £8.99
This year's Women's prize for fiction was fiercely contested, with Homes's sixth novel finally taking it with this story of sibling rivalry gone murderously wrong. It centres on Nixon scholar Harold Silver, his brother George and George's children, who come to rest in Harold's care after a series of catastrophes. It's strong stuff, and all the better for it.

Big Brother
Lionel Shriver
HarperCollins, £16.99
Pandora Halfdanarson hasn't seen her brother Edison for a few years – and when they finally meet up, she doesn't recognise him. Down on his luck, Edison has turned to food for comfort. Can high-achieving Pandora turn his life around with a radical diet? Or, as Shriver's narrative suggests, do our appetites have very little to do with the food on our plates?

Sisterland
Curtis Sittenfeld
Doubleday, £16.99
When Violet Shramm has a premonition that St Louis will be hit by an earthquake, her twin sister Kate is torn between impatience with her sibling, fear for her family and an unsettling reminder of her own psychic abilities. If it sounds unbelievable, it is – but that's no bar to enjoyment for the latest novel from the author of Prep and American Wife.

Flight Behaviour
Barbara Kingsolver
Faber, pbk £7.99
In the Appalachians, frustrated wife and mother Dellarobia is witness to an extraordinary phenomenon; a mass of orange butterflies. Kingsolver combines personal and environmental stories to create a compelling picture of small-town life and big-world disaster.

Strange Bodies
Marcel Theroux
Faber, £14.99
A wonderfully brainy beach read, this mashup of thriller, SF and literary history takes in everything from communist utopian schemes to the brilliance of Samuel Johnson, and is narrated by a man who's already dead.

The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers
Sceptre, pbk £7.99
Written by an Iraq veteran, The Yellow Birds is a brutal account of war in the 21st century. Private John Bartle's return to his mother's home in America is equally heartbreaking. It won last year's Guardian first book award.

The Infatuations
Javier Marías
Penguin, £18.99
The work of a master in his prime, this is a murder story that becomes an enthralling vehicle for all the big questions about life, love, fate and death. It's also a meditation on the nature of sexual obsession, conveyed in an exemplary translation.

Skios
Michael Frayn
Faber, pbk £7.99
On an idyllic Greek island, an eminent intellectual arrives to deliver the keynote address at a lofty cultural institute. Also checking in is a caddish fop bent on freeloading and womanising. One can only imagine what would happen if somehow their identities became confused – and so Frayn does, in a whirling comedy that has more teeth than its gentle setting might at first suggest.

Canada
Richard Ford
Bloomsbury, pbk £8.99
"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." With an opening line like that, you know you're going to be in for something special; and Ford duly delivers a bravura tale about a teenage boy in flight from his past, propelled ceaselessly forward to the promised safety of the Canadian border.

The Woman Upstairs
Claire Messud
Virago, £14.99
Primary school teacher Nora is angry, but she's also a very good person; perhaps that's why she's so angry. The horrible pull between duty and self-fulfilment – particularly for women – is Messud's subject, animated in the fierce, meticulous story of a single woman's passionate attachment to an entire family.

Schroder
Amity Gaige
Faber, £14.99
A father abducts his much-loved daughter, and goes on the run with her. Erik Schroder – liar and kidnapper – isn't the most obviously sympathetic of narrators, but beware: this moving, funny, disturbing novel will have you in floods of tears, onlookers bedamned.

Crime

The Carrier
Sophie Hannah
Hodder, pbk £7.99, out 1 August
The genius of Hannah's domestic thrillers – along with the twistiest plots known to woman – is that she creates ordinary people whose psychological quirks make them as monstrous as any serial killer. Her latest investigates narcissism and fear of intimacy through a typically convoluted set-up involving lost love and a confession of murder.

Gods and Beasts
Denise Mina
Orion, pbk £7.99
The third Alex Morrow novel displays Mina's acuity and empathy brilliantly. It's not just about the illegal but the criminal and the immoral, and features a disgraced Scottish leftwing politician taking on the media. Draw the parallels at your leisure.

Bad Monkey
Carl Hiaasen
Sphere, £16.99
Hiaasen's latest subtropical screwball comedy has been rightly hailed as a return to form. Set in the Florida Keys and the Bahamas, it features a disgraced cop, a beauteous coroner and a monkey that was sacked from Pirates of the Caribbean for obnoxious behaviour.

The Shining Girls
Lauren Beukes
HarperCollins, £12.99
Billed as the next Gone Girl (though not alone in that), this thriller is a spirited blend of genres in which time travel meets serial murder. Our villain is a Chicago drifter who can select his victims from different eras and disappear without a trace; our heroine the girl who gets away and then plots to hunt him down. It's a smart idea, smartly executed.

Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Phoenix, pbk £7.99
Last year's word-of-mouth hit faces challenges from imitators – a "girl" in the title here, a touch of orange on the jacket there – but Flynn's bewitching mystery about a missing wife is now in paperback and will be seen at poolsides and in airport lounges everywhere for a second summer.

Non-fiction

The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction
Nate Silver
Penguin, pbk £8.99
Statistician and political forecaster Nate Silver made headlines in 2012 by predicting the results of the US presidential election in 50 out of 50 states. His guide to thinking probabilistically will help you spot the elusive signal amid the background noise.

The Examined Life
Stephen Grosz
Chatto & Windus, £14.99
Described as "modest and profound" by one reviewer, this highly enjoyable book presents a series of case histories, drawn from psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz's 25 years of experience listening to people talk about their lives and problems. He doesn't promise easy solutions. Rather he allows them to feel "alive in the mind of another".

Margaret Thatcher, Vol 1: Not for Turning
Charles Moore
Allen Lane, £30
Based on unparalleled access to personal papers, this first volume of Charles Moore's authorised biography gives a richly textured account of Thatcher's journey from Grantham to Westminster. Although he's clearly an admirer of the Iron Lady, Moore is not afraid to criticise. This hugely praised volume ends on a triumphant note as everyone gathers at Downing Street in November 1982 to celebrate the success of the Falklands campaign.

Levels of Life
Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape, £10.99
Julian Barnes faces what must be the hardest task for any author: writing about the death of a loved one. His wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, died in 2008 and this attempt to "give sorrow words" has been described by Blake Morrison as a "category-defying book". A moving and characteristically eloquent memoir on love and loss.

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan
William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, £25
The first British invasion of Afghanistan took place in 1839 and ended a few years later in a humiliating and bloody retreat for the imperial army. In this enthralling study, William Dalrymple explores the causes and tragic consequences of the war. Described by Diana Athill as a "uniquely valuable history", it is required reading for anyone who wants to understand what Dalrymple terms "the neo-colonial adventures of our own day".

Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo
Portobello Books, pbk £9.99
Annawadi is a slum on the edge of Mumbai airport. In its shadow lives a precarious community of construction workers and economic migrants, all desperate for a piece of the country's booming future. When a shocking crime rocks Annawadi, the rottenness at the heart of the new India is exposed. Boo blends the clear-eyed candour of a journalist with a novelist's sense of drama in a modern morality tale.

What Matters in Jane Austen
John Mullan
Bloomsbury, pbk £8.99
In the world of Jane Austen, how much money is enough? What is the right way to propose? Why do we never see the lower classes? These are the questions that John Mullan answers in his crisp, witty study of the minutiae of Austen's universe. But don't assume this is trivial stuff. It's in the fine detail, Mullan says, that we get to understand how Austen's characters think and feel.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Sheryl Sandberg
WH Allen, £16.99
Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, urges ambitious professional women to ditch their inner critic and take a risk by asking for a raise or a seat on the board. You know, like men do. It all sounds eminently sensible, but Sandberg's critics have accused her of underestimating the cultural and institutional barriers that stop even the most self-confident of women getting on.

The Old Ways
Robert Macfarlane
Penguin, pbk £9.99
Robert Macfarlane puts on his walking boots once more and heads out to tramp the old paths and bridleways that crisscross modern Britain. His prose, as always, is richly lyrical and deftly made. This time he has a ghostly companion in the shape of Edward Thomas, the Georgian poet who wrote so compellingly about the Icknield Way before dying on the fields of France.

Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-1959
David Kynaston
Bloomsbury, £25
This is the latest volume in the historian's acclaimed series about Britain since 1945, Tales of a New Jerusalem. Focusing on the years of Harold Macmillan's first government, it echoes with the diverse voices of 1950s Britain, from Surbiton housewives ("Why should I spend all morning making scones?") to Enoch Powell's nationalist rhetoric. It is, writes Richard Davenport-Hines, a "shrewd, funny and ever-readable book".

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
James Lasdun
Jonathan Cape, £14.99
Creative-writing lecturer James Lasdun thought he was being warm and encouraging. His student mistook it for something more. Before Lasdun knew it, he was the victim of full-blown cyber-stalking. Give Me Everything You Have is a chilling excursion into memoir from a novelist who has never been afraid to stare down darkness.

5 Days in May
Andrew Adonis
Biteback Publishing, £12.99
No one knows better what went on during the tense days that followed the general election of May 2010 than Andrew Adonis, Labour's chief negotiator. Here he gives a gripping, West Wing-style account of the wheeling and dealing behind the scenes as both the major parties try to boss and flatter the Lib Dems into a coalition. Knowing the ending doesn't make the story any less gripping.

Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies
Hadley Freeman
Fourth Estate, £12.99
In this wry take on the self-help format, Hadley Freeman (of this parish) dispenses tips and jokes to youngish women. You'll find advice on dating, fashion and friendship, all delivered with Freeman's native New York brio. Behind the wit there are some hard, smart truths too.

The Norm Chronicles: Stories and Numbers About Danger
Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter
Profile Books, £12.99
How dangerous is dangerous? The Norm Chronicles reduces jeopardy to a neat formula and invites you to conduct a risk assessment on yourself. One drink a day is good for you and the first 20 minutes of exercise are the ones that really matter. On the other hand, red meat can shave minutes off your life while cigs will lop it off in half-hour chunks.

This Boy: A Memoir of Childhood
Alan Johnson
Bantam, £16.99
There's nothing of the misery memoir about Alan Johnson's account of his childhood in post-war London. Instead he gives us a moving portrait of the two extraordinary women who helped him thrive in circumstances that are frankly grim. There's Lily, his mother, who battled ill-health and domestic violence and his big sister Linda, who fought to keep him out of care. This is a generous and exacting book.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure
Artemis Cooper
John Murray, pbk £9.99
Patrick Leigh Fermor's epic life might almost seem too big and bold for mere biography. But Artemis Cooper does a wonderful job of retelling the story of how "Paddy" tramped across Europe in the 1930s, slept with princesses and kidnapped Nazis on his beloved island of Crete. Affectionate but never credulous, Cooper gets the measure of the man.

The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records
Stuart Maconie
Ebury Press, £13.99
In this love letter to the post-war pop song, Stuart Maconie argues that commercial music has managed to say more about love, war, death, sex and class than almost any other art form. Here he charts the 50 songs that have provided the soundtrack to our changing lives, from Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" through "She Loves You" to "Radio Gaga". Think Proust, wrapped up in three and a half minutes.

A History of Cricket in 100 Objects
Gavin Mortimer
Serpent's Tail, £12.99
Gavin Mortimer tells an intriguing story about how cricket developed from a medieval village game to a huge global business. Along the way we meet stoic Yorkshiremen, American money-men and elegant Indians, all happy to explain the arcana of wicket and willow. You don't have to be a regular at Lord's to enjoy Mortimer's well-chosen anecdotes.

Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
Sarah Churchwell
(Virago, £16.99)
Sarah Churchwell ventures deep into the heart of the American Dream to explain the enduring fascination of F Scott Fitzgerald's brief but haunting novel. The result is a biography of a book that is also a portrait of an intoxicating era of jazz clubs, speakeasies, and organised crime. She even throws a sensational double murder into the mix to cast new light on Fitzgerald's masterpiece.

Who Owns the Future?
Jaron Lanier
Allen Lane, £20
"Information is people in disguise," says computer scientist Jaron Lanier. He explores the impact of the digital revolution on the economy and individuals, arguing that in this age of big data our personal information should not be controlled and exploited by corporations.

The Sea Inside
Philip Hoare
Fourth Estate, £18.99
Philip Hoare won the 2009 Samuel Johnson prize for Leviathan or, The Whale. His latest book focuses on the ocean itself. In this evocative mix of cultural history and travel writing, Hoare dives with dolphins and discovers the lives and seascapes of the sailors, scientists, and others who have loved the briny. Ideal beach reading.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
Michael Pollan
Allen Lane, £20
This is a heartfelt paean to one of the most fundamental human activities: cooking. Pollan celebrates the ancient ways in which we used the elements to transform raw food, and argues that our modern fast-food diets are literally killing us. We would all be much healthier and happier if we spent more time in the kitchen rather than watching celebrity chefs on TV.

Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, and Why It Still Matters
Philip Hensher
Macmillan, £16.99
In an age when typing threatens to make handwriting redundant, Philip Hensher argues that we should treasure it as a vital expression of human individuality. From Elizabeth I's signature and the invention of copperplate in the 18th century, to the 19th-century pseudo-science of divining character from writing and the modern ballpoint pen, Hensher guides us through the very human history of handwriting.

The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us
David Thomson
Allen Lane, £25
Praised by John Banville as "probably the best overview of the cinema ever written", this is a passionate and deeply nostalgic love letter to the silver screen. For Thomson, now in his 70s, the cinema is a magical place where dreams come alive, and where people's views of love, identity and desire are shaped. In this hefty history, Thomson travels from "Muybridge to Facebook", and hails the golden age of the movies as one of the great achievements of human civilisation.

Money: The Unauthorised Biography
Felix Martin
Bodley Head, £20
Felix Martin, an economist and fund manager, wants to change the way you think about money. He rejects the textbook idea that it's an alternative to barter, the oil in the engine of the world economy. He sees money as a liberating (though unstable) system of creating and exchanging credit. This original and thought-provoking history of what's in your wallet also offers some controversial solutions to the financial crisis, such as raising inflation levels and writing off national debts.

Wave
Sonali Deraniyagala
Little, Brown, £12.99
On 26 December 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala was enjoying a holiday in Sri Lanka with her two sons, her husband and parents when the tsunami struck, knocking her unconscious and sweeping her family away. She never saw them again. "The most moving book I have ever read about grief," was how William Dalrymple described it.

Unapologetic
Francis Spufford
Faber, pbk £8.99
Francis Spufford says he doesn't know if God exists. But nor, he points out, does Richard Dawkins. What Spufford does know, though, is that there are things about Christianity that feel right and good, and can't be got elsewhere. Unapologetic is a sharp, witty defence of faith which proves that, sometimes, the Devil doesn't have the best tunes.

On the Map
Simon Garfield
Profile, £16.99
From the early sketches of Antarctica to today's Google Earth, Simon Garfield explores how maps relate and re-imagine our history. We meet a whole cast of cartographical characters, including guesswork surveyors, unreliable navigators and sticky-fingered fraudsters. It's this wonkiness that fascinates Garfield most, as he reveals how maps are, in fact, another species of fiction. A book in which to get pleasurably lost.

By Alex Clark, John Dugdale, Kathryn Hughes, Justine Jordan, PD Smith.