Barbara Kingsolver won the Pulitzer prize for fiction this month for her retelling of David Copperfield set in the valleys of southwest Virginia at the height of America’s present opioid crisis. “Daring, entertaining, symbolic and highly readable — and therefore authentically Dickensian,” our reviewer wrote of this big, bustling novel full of characters and life.
Out now
Faber, £9.99
After her highfalutin’ Booker longlisted debut, Sophie Ward swerved into genre with this stylish, pacey and genuinely frightening police procedural. It’s December 1990 on the marshy edges of east London and a ten-year-old schoolgirl has vanished. Her parents are the obvious suspects, but DS Emma Carter, who hides orange Fanta in her glove compartment and her girlfriend from her male superiors, suspects there’s weirdness afoot
