The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton; Moral Injuries by Christie Watson; The Hunter by Tana French; How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin; Every Move You Make by CL Taylor

The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton (Raven, £20)
Turton’s third novel explores life, death and the point of existence itself. A dystopian race-against-time whodunnit, it is set 90 years after the world has been destroyed by a fatal fog. All that remains is a small Greek island and the half mile of sea that surrounds it, inhabited by three scientists – living to a great age thanks to advances made before the planet was engulfed – and 122 villagers. Abi, a mysterious AI voice who can read thoughts, ensures that life in the concrete ruins of the island’s old naval base is peaceful and that the villagers don’t – with the single exception of a curious woman, Emory – ask questions. When one of the scientists is killed, and the island’s defences are shut down, Emory has just 92 hours to solve the murder and save the last of humanity. This is an ambitious, compelling novel in which nothing is what it seems.

Moral Injuries by Christie Watson (W&N, £16.99)
The sins of the mothers are visited on the children in former nurse Watson’s superior medical thriller. Laura, an air ambulance doctor; Olivia, a heart surgeon at the same London hospital; and Anjali, a GP, met at medical school. They are well established in their careers, Laura and Olivia with teenage children and Anjali and her partner adopting a baby, when their shared past, in the form of a wild student party during which things went horribly wrong, threatens to overshadow the present. Old loyalties are challenged and the bonds of friendship morph into a pact of mutually assured destruction, where every choice comes with a terrible price. The three women pass the narrative baton, flipping between 1999 and the present day for a thoughtful, humane and complex examination of ambition, betrayal, moral obligation, and ethical grey areas personal and professional.

Young women come together in Nevada for a tournament where ambition and self-expression clash with brutal reality

For those of us who consider ourselves fans there is no sport quite so pure, so outright poetic as boxing, because this simple art of consensual combat offers no place to hide. Unlike other working-class sports such as football, with its amateur dramatics and petty squabbles, or American football and its endless ad breaks, boxing boils it down to the basics: hit and be hit, and in the best fighters we get to see the perfect symbiosis of artistry, strategy and brutality. Humans like to watch violence as much as we like to tell stories, and each fighter brings with them a narrative.

Little wonder, then, that down the years boxing has inspired some of the best sports writing, and we can now add American author Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel to an expansive canon.

The author’s second novel considers a gay teacher’s struggles with intimacy and heritage

‘Our People. Scattered to your four winds … They land, but do they grow where they fall?” This “half-dreamy, half-sad” question, addressed by a Ghanaian father to his son Kwame, haunts Michael Donkor’s second novel. It casts doubt on the promised land of dream and opportunity that drives so many diasporic narratives: one where first-generation immigrants sweat and save, so that the second generation enjoys a better education and life.

Education is key here, as Kwame is an out gay English teacher in a London state school, helping students grapple with Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Mrs Dalloway. He has a good life – a stable job, supportive parents and colleagues, a flatshare with a posh white sommelier friend, Edwyn. As the son of working-class immigrants, Kwame is well versed in his parents’ pride and sacrifices; he has his ears tuned to racist microaggressions, while his heart is that of a caring teacher. On most fronts, he has landed on his feet. But there’s always something missing in anyone’s life, and in Kwame’s case, it’s men. His self-imposed Grindr ban has lasted eight months. Can he grow as a Black gay man without sex and intimacy? Why is he so uptight, and “a master at gracious refusal”?

The Nigerian author of Second Class Citizen wrote from real-life experience about the universal problems of poverty and oppression that could be the burdens of women everywhere

Buchi Emecheta’s journey – from orphaned child, through marital oppression, single motherhood and societal prejudice, to fulfilment as an internationally acclaimed writer – though often described in terms of a rags-to-riches tale is better characterised as one woman’s dogged pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream. Recurrent themes in her novels – motherhood, female independence and freedom through education – are all the more powerful since they are never far from her own real-life experiences. Although it is easy to categorise her as a Nigerian female writer, she herself felt that she was writing “stories of the world”, about the universal problems of poverty and oppression that may be the burdens of women anywhere or everywhere.

Hers was a long, focused struggle for what she felt her rightful due. The accolades did come, but so did the tragedies. Two daughters predeceased her, and she herself suffered a debilitating stroke just weeks before she was due to receive an OBE in 2005. Her son Sylvester Onwordi has written that he felt his mother was “always living a provisional life, based to some extent on survival … she did not really get to enjoy the full fruits of her success”. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the author’s second novel, Second Class Citizen – a great excuse to get stuck in to Emecheta’s work. Here are some good places to begin.

This pitch-black debut, lurching from comedy of manners to grand guignol, will be catnip to fans of Saltburn

It’s sometimes said that all war movies, whatever their stance, end up being propaganda for war. In The Kellerby Code, a version of the argument is made about PG Wodehouse . “Propaganda for poshos,” one character says briskly when she sees the protagonist reading The Code of the Woosters. “Every book set in an English country house is an advert for a system that fucks everyone apart from the chinny cunts who live in them.”

Jonny Sweet’s debut novel, then, is very conscious of the tradition in which it stands. It’s a lurid black-comedy-cum-thriller about social climbing and murder in which Brideshead Revisited and Wodehouse are frequently and nudgingly referenced, and further back in the mix are The Great Gatsby , a dab of Patricia Highsmith and a lick of the Martin Amis of Dead Babies. Coming in the afterwash of Saltburn, it’s very on trend. Call it Brideshead gothic, perhaps.

The horror author on stealing from other writers, why she can’t stand pathos and how Mickey Mouse has inspired her new short-story collection Minihorror

In Vienna, every second building looks like it was built for a king, the waiters who serve your coffee wear tuxedos, and public transport is not just efficient and cheap, the council pays musicians to play Mozart in the carriages. But in the stories of Serbian author Barbi Marković, set in the Austrian city and its surroundings, there’s something not quite right about the place.

In Minihorror, the 44-year-old’s very strange and very addictive short story collection, horrifying things lurk behind splendid baroque facades. A guest at a New Year’s Eve rooftop party discovers a secret passageway leading her into a parallel universe in the building next door. A man bites into a delicious looking bar of Alpine chocolate to discover it is infested with fleshy white maggots. A woman visits her boyfriend’s family in the countryside and discovers they are all made of cookie dough.

The Native American story is painfully alive in an impressive second novel that moves from 19th-century massacres to present-day Oakland

The Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s astonishing 2018 debut novel, There There , offered a kaleido­scopic portrait of urban Native American identity. Composed of an all-Native cast, it ruminated on power, storytelling, dispossession, erasure and historical memory. The novel’s off-the-wall structure placed its central event – a mass shooting at an Oakland powwow – at the book’s end, leaving its aftermath largely unattended.

Now comes an emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel, Wandering Stars. A companion to There There, it brings news about Orvil Red Feather, who was hit by a bullet while dancing at the event. It tells, too, the story of Orvil’s younger brothers Loother and Lony; their great-aunt Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, in whose care they have been since losing their drug-addicted mother to suicide; and Jacquie Red Feather, Opal’s half-sister and the boys’ estranged “real grandma”, a recovering alcoholic who is living “her sobriety, moment by moment, step by step, day by day”. The novel’s first sections, however, belong not to these people but to their ancestors, beginning with Jude Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre.

The debut Irish writer circles around twentysomethings with crap jobs, crap men and even worse housing work in this nicely observed collection

The latest Sally Rooney-endorsed Irish writer makes a book-length debut with a short story collection that captures the experience of being a young woman today with a clear eye and a listless sigh. Crap jobs and a desire not to go to them, crap men and the desire still to go to them, and worse-than-crap housing are common themes in these airless stories of aimless women.

The title isn’t just cute: it’s no surprise when Rebecca Ivory thanks her therapists in her acknowledgment. She is excellent at revealing how our understanding of ourselves, and others, is a layered and silently shifting thing; she peels back what is said to expose the tender and embarrassing desires and delusions beneath. Her characters are frequently self-aware yet stuck – trapped in agonised inaction. They’re defeated by the most basic tasks; one fails to replace a lightbulb, another a broken bike light, as if preferring to simply stay in the dark.