Damon Galgut's Booker-shortlisted fifth novel is narrated by Frank Eloff, a middle-aged South African medic whose isolated hospital has virtually no patients. Frank and his small band of colleagues conscientiously report for duty each day, yet weeks go by without them doing anything more important than filling in forms or playing darts. This bizarre existence is disturbed by the arrival of Laurence Waters, a young doctor fresh out of medical [...]

At 24, Adam Thirlwell is a conspicuously youthful writer. In January he was named one of Granta magazine's 20 best young British novelists, even before his first novel appeared. His inclusion - along with Monica Ali, also unpublished at the time - caused a stir. Now, finally, we get to see what all the fuss was about.

Politics is set in fashionably multicultural north London. The novel opens with Moshe, [...]

On 25 April 1953, the journal Nature published James Watson and Francis Crick's landmark paper in which they described the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid. It was arguably the defining scientific discovery of the latter half of the 20th century, for which they later shared (with Maurice Wilkins) in the Nobel prize. Experiments in the 1940s had identified DNA as the repository of hereditary information in cells; Erwin Schrodinger, pre-eminent for [...]

In his latest book, Oliver James amasses research from social and medical science to support his tenet that personality is largely formed during our first six years, and that the principal determinant of who we are is our upbringing, not our genes. Children cannot be considered as genetic Tonka Toys, trundling across the carpet of life on a preordained course, surmounting obstacles in their path. Instead, they are psychological Play-Doh, [...]

The Second World War is an important historical period for Kazuo Ishiguro. His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), both deal with the impact of the conflict on the country of his birth, Japan. The Remains of the Day, the 1989 Booker Prize winner, is set in Britain in the years leading up to, and immediately after, the war, [...]

The narrator of Paul Golding's debut, a thirtysomething man of Anglo-Spanish descent, is ensnared in a London gay scene offering abundant opportunity for bad sex and precious little intimacy. Iago - or James, as his English acquaintances know him - is disenfranchised from the gratuitous physicality around him. He fixes, with delusional intensity, on a prostitute called Steve, whom he feels (for some reason) will be the source of the [...]

Shauna Singh Baldwin's debut novel, set in Punjab between 1937 and 1947, the final decade of the colonial era in India, concerns the lives of three Sikhs: Roop, a village girl whose exceptional beauty destines her for marriage high above her social stratum; Sardarji, the wealthy landowner who takes her for his bride; and Satya, his upper-class first wife who has failed, after two decades of marriage, to produce an [...]

Jim Crace's sixth novel begins with the two central characters lying murdered on an isolated beach. Joseph and Celice, both zoologists, had met as postgraduates on a field trip to Baritone Bay, their relationship being consummated among its dunes. When, after three decades of marriage, they discover that the area is about to be bulldozed to build luxury houses and a marina, the idea of a nostalgic return takes hold. [...]

At one point in Niall Williams's second novel, the central character, Stephen Griffin, abruptly resigns his teaching post in a small Irish town. "I am in love," he explains to the uncomprehending headmistress. The words sound "strangely childish and unreal" to her, having no place in a world "hardened by a thousand revelations of abuse and corruption and greed". This announcement by Griffin is also a statement of the author's [...]

Raj Kamal Jha's first novel is set in contemporary Calcutta. The premise is beguiling. The narrator, an unnamed middle-aged bachelor, spends a night writing a collection of stories, while across the room an hours-old baby girl sleeps on a blue bedspread. From the outset we learn that the child is to be taken away and adopted the following morning. The stories are to go with her, to be read when [...]