A writer takes his elderly mother on a road trip through the Swiss Alps in an attempt to break with his privileged family’s dysfunctional past

Christian Kracht is a Swiss novelist who writes in German. He has been publishing since 1995, when his debut Faserland won him favourable comparisons to Bret Easton Ellis and Nick Hornby. Despite Kracht’s high profile among German-language readers, Eurotrash is only the third of his novels to be translated into English. The first was 2012’s Imperium, inspired by the life of the historical figure August Engelhardt, an eccentric who founded a utopian cult in the South Seas based on sun worship and eating coconuts.

Eurotrash works a smaller, more personal canvas. It tells the story of a middle aged Swiss-German writer called Christian who wrote a novel called Faserland in the 1990s and now finds himself in Zurich, visiting his elderly mother. The apparently autofictional form might seem tricksy, if the revelations that follow weren’t so heartfelt. Christian’s mother is in her 80s, frail, mentally ill and medicating herself with a mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs.

Eurotrash by Christian Kracht is translated by Daniel Bowles and published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

A choice of whodunnits, a return for le Carré’s Smiley, and dark, disturbing encounters in the woods

This year the trend for cosy crime novels with added bells and whistles has continued unabated, offering everything from metafiction to ghosts who solve their own murders. Bella Mackie’s second novel, What a Way to Go (Borough), is one of the best . Hedge fund boss Anthony Wistern is universally loathed, so when he dies mysteriously there are plenty of suspects. The narrative baton is passed between his widow Olivia, the obsessive crime blogger Sleuth, and Anthony himself – who, from the dingy limbo of a “processing centre”, must figure out how he perished in order to transition to the afterlife. It’s a delightful blend of whodunnit, Succession-style family infighting, and Jilly Cooperesque social comedy.

There’s more fun to be had with irredeemable characters in Jonny Sweet’s debut The Kellerby Code (Faber). Edward Jevons is in self-hating thrall to his posh, entitled university friends. He’s in love with Stanza, but his already fragile mental state is undermined by the discovery that she and Robert – to whom Edward has repeatedly confessed his adoration – are an item. As events at Stanza’s ancestral home spiral out of control, the pressure becomes unbearable. Very dark and very funny: perfect for fans of Saltburn.

As part of the award, the author will have a gloucestershire old spots pig named after his debut book which is set in ancient Sicily

Ferdia Lennon has been awarded the 2024 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, which means a pig will be named after his winning novel, Glorious Exploits .

The prize, set up in 2000, seeks to recognise the funniest new novels that best evoke the spirit of PG Wodehouse’s work. As well as the chance to name a gloucestershire old spots pig, the winner receives a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and a complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection.

The novelist’s cult book about a stay-at-home mother who turns into a dog is now a film starring Amy Adams. She talks about modern parenting, breaking taboos, and how Trump’s win spurred her to write

R achel Yoder knows exactly why she wrote her bestselling debut novel, Nightbitch. “After the 2016 US elections, I was in shock and I was also vibrating with anger.” Facing Donald Trump’s first term, she didn’t know what to do with all her “rage and disbelief and confusion” – especially because she was experiencing the same feelings about early motherhood.

Published in 2021, Nightbitch is a strange and unforgettable story about a sleep-deprived stay-at-home mother who, after apparently growing extra nipples, sharper canine teeth and a tail, develops an “exhilarating and magical” ability to literally become a powerful bitch.

Wedding mayhem, a story of lifelong love and fake‑relationship comedy are among the highlights

The Wedding People
Alison Espach, Phoenix
Books as fun as this one are few and far between. Every room in a luxury American hotel is booked out for a ludicrously OTT wedding – except for one. Phoebe Stone is preparing for something quite different: she is going to end her life in the most expensive suite. When spoilt Lila, the bride to be, realises that someone is getting in the way of her perfect day, mayhem breaks loose – but not in the way you might expect. This novel is unexpected and delightful, funny but never cruel, and loving and tender towards all its characters, even the villainous sister-in-law. If you feel your romcoms are getting a little too predictable, this is the book for you: pure enjoyment, and an excellent gift for almost anyone.

Say You’ll Be My Jaan
Naina Kumar, Penguin
“Think of it like Tinder,” we’re told of arranged marriage. “Except your parents are the algorithm.” Fake-relationship romances are nothing new, but this one is particularly lovely. Karthik is work-focused and trying to placate his mother; Meghna is still in love with The One Who Got Away and needs a plus-one for his wedding, so they agree to an arranged engagement – and guess what? Kumar jumps perspectives easily and keeps things moving in a novel that’s so warm and funny, and particularly good on food and cultural expectations, that’s it’s incredibly impressive that it’s a debut.

Arthurian legend, dark family secrets, monsters, princesses and a Russian detective in this year’s picks

British writer and illustrator Isabel Greenberg’s stellar run of graphic novels has taken in ice-bound fables and the Brontës. In this year’s thoroughly entertaining Young Hag (Jonathan Cape), a trainee witch sets out on a quest to mend the broken Excalibur and return magic to Britain. Greenberg gives Arthurian legend a feminist twist, complete with faerie tricksters, cat-riding knights and a meddling Merlin.

Art, dreams and reality form a near-seamless mesh in Final Cut (Pantheon), the unsettling and beautifully executed latest book from Black Hole creator Charles Burns. It follows Brian, an awkward young movie obsessive who lives with his alcoholic mother. He and his friends film tentacled aliens, forest trails and each other as sexual tension builds and Brian struggles to bend life to his script.

Edwin Frank’s finely judged survey of modern fiction from Dostoevsky to Sebald will have you reaching for novels you hadn’t thought about in years

Edwin Frank vows in his introduction to this book to try to do for the fiction of the last century what the critic Alex Ross’s landmark book The Rest Is Noise did for its music. He is as good as his word. This is the most engaging imagining of the progress of the 20th-century novel you will read. Frank brings serious erudition to the task – in his day job he is editorial director of New York Review Books and has for 25 years edited its eclectic classics series which breathes new life into half-forgotten or out-of-print treasures. Though he has a fine critical judgment, Frank writes as an enthusiast at least as much as an academic, trusting his taste, always alive to the stories he is telling and the arguments he makes.

His method is broadly chronological, offering the reader a “long” 20th century, beginning with Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) and concluding with WG Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). The choice of those two particular bookends to his study of 30-odd examples of the modern novel gives some idea of the emphasis of the project and the interests of the author. He is drawn to books that challenge the form itself in different ways, those that self-consciously or otherwise disrupt the more stately certainties of the great 19th-century novels. “The writers of the 20th century are ambushed by history,” Frank writes. “They exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the 19th-century novel sought to maintain can no longer be maintained, even as fiction.”

The Finnish novelist’s reissued debut, about a man who rescues and cares for a troll, still feels fresh and bright 20 years on

First published in English two decades ago under the title Not Before Sundown , this novel was named one of the top 10 Nordic books . Now smartly retitled as Troll: A Love Story , and with only the odd reference to Windows 98 and CD-Roms to show its age, Finnish novelist Johanna Sinisalo’s debut feels fresh and bright.

It’s set in a world like ours but for one precise adjustment. In the Finland of the novel, trolls, rather than living under bridges in children’s books, are real creatures. The result of “convergent evolution” with primates, they have “pseudo-humanoid external characteristics” and were discovered living in the wild in the early 20th century.

The acclaimed novelist thought he had finished with ‘serious’ books. But now, at 78 and still grieving the loss of his wife, he has a new project on the go

I’m going to get a glass of wine, will you have one?” John Banville asks. “I mean, we’re OK, it’s just about noon.” We’re sitting in Banville’s upstairs living room in the harbour village of Howth, just outside Dublin. The low, deep house is in a terrace that rises up behind the seafront. There used to be a good view across the bay from these top windows, he says, but he had to sell the parcel of land across the street and now they are building “a monstrosity” on it. The novelist has lived here since the early 1980s; it is where he has written nearly all of his books – including the 2005 Booker prize winner The Sea . For someone who, it is said, has spent eight to 10 hours a day writing for all of his adult life, Banville insists he is no lover of solitude. “You’re not really alone when you are writing,” he says, “and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.”

These days he shares this house with his 51-year-old son. His sometime estranged wife, the textile artist Janet Dunham, died three years ago and he is still, he says, in a “fugue state” of grief. It didn’t help that it happened during the pandemic. “She was diagnosed with advanced liver cancer,” he says, “and got Covid five days after, and died four days after that.” He couldn’t write for months and remains, he says, not himself. “I now realise that there are only two kinds of people in the world. People who are bereaved and those who are yet to be bereaved,” he says. “And it’s no comfort really that you know it happens to every [couple]. Because those other people, they didn’t lose the person you loved.”