The story of a Mormon couple living in Merseyside failing to cope with the death of one of their children, A Song For Issy Bradley is a deeply moving portrait of a family in rapid disintegration which also manages to be very funny.

Claire was a convert to Mormonism. She joined because she fell in love with Ian, now Bishop Bradley. Her religion has always been more of an accommodation than anything else and she has tended to ignore those parts of the doctrine that she inwardly baulked it. Now, the death of her daughter Issy has pulled the rug away from beneath her comfortable self-deception. Everything about the religious community in which she has embedded herself, seems irksome and pointless.

I didn't know anything about Mormonism but I do now and, as with all religions, what appears perfectly normal to the initiate seems very weird indeed to the outsider. Carys Bray, who grew up in a Mormon family, brilliantly manipulates the disjuncture between the interior space of a deeply religious family and the uncomprehendingly secular wider world, much of which is seen through the eyes of the dead girl's siblings who have been brought up on tales of miracles and divine intervention but are now confronted with the mundane reality of bereavement.

This is one of those novels that opens a window into a hidden world and, in doing so, simultaneously highlights the strangeness and the sameness of all human behaviour. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, this is a wonderful read.

A Post-Apocalyptic Nightmare I Didn't Want To Wake Up From

The premise of this post-apocalyptic thriller makes it sound like a real piece of pulp fiction. The story is set on a military base that is one of the last outposts of humanity. Most of the rest of the human race have been infected by a parasitic fungus that turns them into flesh-eating zombies known as 'Hungries'. Here on the base they are desperately seeking a cure.

Don't be fooled. The Girl With All The Gifts is much more than a genre thriller. It is an intelligently written, character-based piece of speculative fiction. Seen largely from the point of view of one of the Hungries, a highly-intelligent child who only gradually comes to understand her true nature, it presents the reader with a series of moral dilemmas and avoids offering easy solutions.

It's also compelling reading. I had to regularly stop myself reading so I could get on with the rest of my life. Now that's it's over I wish I could start all over again.

Elegant Literary Fantasy

Seen largely from the point of view of his servant, Eustace, The Maker Of Swans is the story of Mr Crowe, a remarkable individual who seems to have existed for many centuries and who has secretly been the author of many of the world's greatest works of literature. Seen largely from the point of view of his servant, Eustace, The Maker Of Swans is the story of Mr Crowe, a remarkable individual who seems to have existed for many centuries and who has secretly been the author of many of the world's greatest works of literature.

It is also the story of Clara, a child in Crowe's charge. Clara's abilities will surpass her guardian's by as much as his own abilities outstrip those of ordinary mortals. Despite being mute, she will learn how to use written language to alter and to create reality and her developing talent will attract the attention of those who seek to use her as a gambit in a long-standing power game.

It is not a perfect fantasy. There are gaps in the backstory that left me slightly dissatisfied. We never learn much about Mr Crowe's origins, for example, or those of his young ward.

What makes this novel stand out, however, is the boldness of the language which richly compensates for the author's apparent disinterest in the finer details of his overarching mythos. Here, for example, is the appearance of one of the minor characters, materialising out of the Gothic twilight in which so much of the action seems to take place:

He appeared at the far end of the street, having rounded the corner, and stood for a moment in the gown of decaying light that hung beneath a street lamp.

Poetic and elegantly mannered, The Maker of Swans is an impressive piece of literary fantasy.

Trapped In A Political Carapace

When asked what he most feared in politics, the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan replied, 'Events, dear boy, events.' In Allan Massie's fictional account of the life of Augustus there is a similar awareness of the way that political life is all about reacting to unpredictable realities.

Massie succeeds admirably in bringing to life the architect of Imperial Rome and the society that surrounded him. He does so far more effectively than all the hefty volumes of toga-lit with their obsessive detailing of military hardware. That's because his focus is on character and psychology, rather than blood on the floor of the arena.

He shows how the need to respond to inconvenient events shaped Augustus as much as it shaped his politics, constraining and hardening him until he became trapped within the political carapace he had created. He ends his life eaten up with regret, fearful for the security of the empire he has built and unable to communicate with those he loves most.

The decisions over which Augustus deliberated so long and hard resonated down through the centuries. Massie's achievement is to illuminate the forces behind those decisions. The result is a compelling study of the man, of the world that he was born into and of the way he transformed it.

Funny, Heartbreaking, Compassionate

Set in Rome, both during the Second World War and in the nineteen seventies, Early One Morning is the story of Chiara Ravello, a young woman, who witnesses the Jews being rounded up and driven away from the Trastevere Ghetto and who, on impulse, persuades the supervising soldiers that a mistake has been made and that one of the children is really her nephew, thereby saving him from the fate to which the rest of his family are consigned.

But this is not another Holocaust story. It is actually concerned with what happens next: the implications of this terrifying decision for Chiara herself, for her disabled sister Cecilia, for Daniele, the boy she impetuously decided to rescue and, thirty years after the event, for a sixteen year old Welsh girl called Maria whose world is about to be turned upside down by the discovery that she is not the person she has always thought herself to be.

Virginia Bailey's writing is beautifully observed. The evocation of Rome - its sights, smells sounds, even its weather - is extraordinarily vivid. It is the next best thing to actually being there. But what gives this book its compelling emotional core is the story of Chiara's fiercely protective love for the angry, uncommunicative little boy she has adopted. This is the story of parenthood writ large.

Funny, heart-breaking, compassionate, Early One Morning is undoubtedly the best book I have read in 2015 and I suspect the experience of reading it will remain with me for a very long time.

Structural Whimsy

A satire on the commodification of modern life, Number 11begins with ten year old Rachel and her brother visiting their grandparents in their quiet suburban house. Her brother drops out of the story entirely but Rachel grows older, goes to Oxford and becomes a tutor to the children of a super-rich family.

The story also follows the fortunes of Rachel's school-friend Alison and her mother, a former pop-star who only ever had one-hit . Alison becomes an unemployed art-student and is set up by a journalist to look like a benefits cheat. Her mother appears on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and the experience ruins her life. In different ways, Rachel and Alison and her mother all fall victim to the machinations of the Winshaws, an influential family at the the heart of the British establishment.

Like all Coe's work, this is a highly political novel and you are left in no doubt about the author's perspective. He is disgusted by the inequality in our society, appalled by the callousness of the rich and powerful, and sickened by the omnipresence of the market. I wouldn't argue with any of that. What wearies me, is his tendency to labour the point. There is no room for the reader to make up his or her own mind. You are constantly directed what to think and which conclusions to draw.

For me, the biggest drawback about this book, however, is not the polemic but the uneasy mixture of the real and the fantastical. Towards the end of the book the story becomes more and more surreal as people begin disappearing and their murders are investigated by a clownish policeman who is obsessed with his media image. Finally giant spiders emerge from excavations under the house of the super-rich family for whom Rachel works and begin dragging people off to their underground lair. It's deliberately left unclear whether this is real or simply the product of Rachel's exhausted imagination. I found this ambivalence something of a cop out.

The tone of the book veers between the sententious and the farcical and that's an uncomfortable combination. There are parts that are genuinely funny and parts that are intellectually engaging but they are all wrapped up in a kind of structural whimsy as the novel takes on the form of the narratives being studied by the characters Rachel encounters. Coe is playing with form here in a way that is certainly clever but which nonetheless left me feeling distinctly underwhelmed.

A Remarkable Piece Of Social History

Thomas Harding's great grandfather, a successful Jewish doctor living in Berlin in the early twentieth century, built a summer house by a lake just outside the city where he and his family spent all their leisure time. Then Hitler came to power and the family was forced to flee to Britain.

Their house underwent a series of incarnations. Seized by the Nazis, it was subsequently bought for a knock down price by a successful music publisher. But he, too, lost possession when the land it stood upon became part of the East German Republic. The house was appropriated by the local government and a series of tenants enjoyed the tranquillity of the the lakeside view until suddenly, overnight, the Berlin Wall was thrown up, right outside the back door.

This book is the story of all the individuals who lived in that house and by illuminating their lives Harding renders the colossal upheavals of the twentieth century deeply personal, and therefore understandable. Compassionate and full of insight, The House By The Lake is a remarkable piece of social history.