JAMES Percival Everett Mantle (panmacmillan.com) £20.00 Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop In mid-19th century Missouri, Jim is a slave owned by Miss Watson, a man who often finds himself the butt of the jokes of local boys Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When Jim hears a rumour that he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter, he decides to flee to local Jackson Island where he can formulate a plan without danger of being spotted and recognised as a runaway slave. Meanwhile, Huckleberry Finn has staged his own murder in order to escape the ..read more

THE LAST MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD Stuart Turton (stuturton.com) Raven Books (bloomsbury.com) £20.00 Almost a century ago, the world was overrun by a myterious insect-filled fog that killed everyone it touched. The last survivors – 122 villagers and 3 scientists who are treated like gods – can be found on a small Greek island, protected from the fog by an invisible barrier. Life on the island is idyllic – the villagers each find their own niche, a task that will benefit the village, while the scientists ensure their continued survival, giving orders where necessary, guiding their charges ..read more

FATHOMFOLK Eliza Chan (elizachan.co.uk) Orbit (www.orbitbooks.net) £18.99 Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop The city of Tiankawi is a city of many facets. Partially-flooded, the parts above water are a testament to human ingenuity, with the humans living in shining towers far above the surface of the polluted water. Closer to the surface, and beneath the waves, the fathomfolk – creatures who have evolved from the denizens of the ocean, many of whom can assume human form on dry land – scrape for a living, forced by draconian human-made laws to live a subservient life, only to ..read more

DEADLY ANIMALS Marie Tierney Zaffre (bonnierbooks.co.uk) £16.99 Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is different from other kids her age. Exceptionally bright, Ava has a keen interest in what happens when things die. She has her own “body farm” situated around the local area, where she can observe the rate of decay of small creatures after they’re dead. Often sneaking out late at night, she records her observations with her always-sharpened blue pencil in her Red Book. One night, as she crawls into a hollow in a hedge to check on a fresh fox cadave ..read more

THE BAD WEATHER FRIEND Dean Koontz(deankoontz.com) Thomas & Mercer (apub.com) £19.99 Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop Benny Catspaw is a nice guy. Just a genuinely nice guy, who can’t imagine being rude or unfriendly to anyone. Even when his life starts to fall apart, Benny can’t believe that it’s anything other than a mistake, that no-one could have set out to deliberately ruin his life. First his job, then his fiancée. What started out as a day full of promise seems to have fallen apart around him. But it’s not all bad: a distant uncle, with the unlikely name of Talma ..read more

CHILDREN OF THE SUN Beth Lewis (bethlewis.co.uk) Hodder & Stoughton (hodder.co.uk) £20 Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop Summer 1982. Following the death of his lover in a horrible car accident, journalist James Morrow has spent months trying to get information about what happened. A tip gives him the name of a woman – Maria – and a possible location – a cult commune deep in the Adirondacks called Atlas, and led by an enigmatic man named Sol. Pitching to his editor as a chance to get the inside story on how these groups work, following the Manson family and Jonestown, Ja ..read more

THE ENCHANTERS James Ellroy (jamesellroy.net) Hutchinson Heinemann (penguin.co.uk) £22 Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop Los Angeles, Saturday 4th August 1962. Marilyn Monroe is found dead in her Hollywood home, victim of a drug overdose. Freddy Otash, ex-policeman-private-eye-king-of-the-scandal-rags has been surveilling her since early April at the behest of Jimmy Hoffa, who is trying to find dirt on two men who are alleged to be Monroe’s lovers – brothers John and Robert Kennedy, the President and Attorney General of the United States respectively. When her body is found ..read more

GOOD SCAMMER Guy Kennaway Mensch Publishing (menschpublishing.com) £20 Clive “Bangaz” Thompson is a West Jamaican native, orphaned at birth, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time: working in a call centre, Bangaz got his hands on a customer list and a handful of scripts – which he built upon and updated over the years – that were to be a veritable pot of gold. Bangaz, and the friends with whom he shared his new business model, brought in millions of dollars over the years to their small community, without recourse to violence and without having to work too hard. Bangaz ..read more

THE CARTOON LIFE AND LOVES OF A STUPID MAN Marc Joan (marc-joan.com) Deixis Press (deixis.press) £13.50 Philippe Favrier is a Frenchman living in Geneva with his beautiful wife, Marilyne. Philippe owns a comic book shop – La Market Jaune – and is heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. Marilyne is a heart surgeon who works, to Philippe’s chagrin, with a man they jokingly call Georges Clooney, because of his resemblence to the actor as a younger man. Philippe struggles with mental health issues, and has been prescribed, by his wife, a revolutionary pill that his father invented. But Philippe is begi ..read more

THE UNSPEAKABLE ACTS OF ZINA PAVLOU Eleni Kyriacou (elenikwriter.com) Head of Zeus (headofzeus.com) £14.99 Buy a copy from your favourite independent bookshop Eva Georgiou is a Greek immigrant living in London with her husband. At night she works the coat check in the Café de Paris, and her name is on the Metropolitan Police’s list as a Greek translator/interpreter. Late one July night in 1954, Eva is roused from her bed and brought to the local police station where she meets Zina Pavlou, a middle-aged Greek woman who speaks no English and who has been accused of murdering her daughter-in-law ..read more