The author has been named winner of the LGBTQ book prize for his second novel, having won the Polari first book award in 2023. This year’s debut award goes to Nicola Dinan, with Sarah Hagger-Holt taking the children’s prize

Jon Ransom has taken home a Polari prize for the second year running, with his second novel The Gallopers winning 2024’s overall prize for books that “push the boundaries of LGBTQ fiction.”

Last year, the author’s debut novel The Whale Tattoo won the Polari first book prize, which has this year been won by Nicola Dinan for her novel Bellies. Meanwhile Sarah Hagger-Holt has been awarded the biannual Polari children’s and YA prize for her children’s story The Fights That Make Us.

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This thoughtful novel about a family trying to breathe clean air and not spend too long on their devices is mesmerising and scary

May loses her office job when the “hums” – humanoid robots – render her role obsolete. It’s hard to find work again. She hears of an opportunity to earn several months’ salary by receiving an experimental facial injection, and takes it. The injection will render May’s face unrecognisable to the ubiquitous hums. She’s a guinea pig for a form of adversarial AI, a technology designed to confound the processing of other tech. She returns home in pain, and looking very subtly different. “It’s really OK,” says her husband, Jem. “I just have a slightly new wife.”

Life is not easy for May and Jem and their two young children, Lu and Sy. Jem, formerly a photographer, takes gig work via an app, doing the odd jobs that rich people don’t want to do: removing corpses from pest traps, or clearing rotting food from a fridge. The air in their city is poisonous and the tap water is tainted. Rubbish blows around; birds, plants and animals are traumatised, shrivelled or extinct. May, Jem, Lu and Sy are all addicted to their devices, spending long periods alone in their individual “wooms”: networked isolation chambers, like a smartphone you can crawl inside.

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An environmental scientist goes in search of a hidden aquifer, in an action-packed novel that reads like a movie pitch

In Giles Foden’s first novel, 1998’s The Last King of Scotland, an idealistic young Celt, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan, travels to Africa into a series of adventures amid the corruption and brutality of Idi Amin’s Uganda. In Foden’s second, Ladysmith, an idealistic young Celt, Irish Bella Kiernan, travels to Africa and has a series of adventures amid the violence of the Boer war and the siege of Ladysmith. In Zanzibar, an idealistic environmental scientist, marine biologist Nick Karolides, travels to Africa and into a series of adventures, events leading up to al-Qaida’s 1998 US embassy bombing in Tanzania.

Now we have Thirst, in which Cat Brosnan, an idealistic young Celt and an environmental scientist, travels to Africa and has a series of adventures searching for a hidden aquifer in the desert of the Skeleton Coast of Namibia. People talk of “ Greeneland ”, as the familiar places and stories that characterise Graham Greene’s writing. Something similar is true of Foden: a westerner’s wild and violent adventures in Africa. Gilesville. Fodenmark.

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An aspiring young artist’s journey makes for a critique of the art world, in novel form

The White Pube , the collaborative identity of critics Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, have always pushed hard at the idea of art criticism. The name is a sardonic twist on both the “white cube” method of presenting art and the eponymous blue-chip gallery. The pair set up a website in 2015 and have become remarkable essayists and critics, refusing to conform to the expectations of the art world establishment. Each time they write, they seem to be asking themselves and the reader: what is criticism?

Poor Artists is their first book, and although they tell us directly in the introduction that we “are reading a piece of art criticism”, they also ask us to “let go of any expectations of rationality”. Most art criticism doesn’t feature a fictional main character, various monsters and ghosts, or a novelistic narrative arc. At the centre of the book is Quest Talukdar, an aspiring artist who is learning about the way the art world chews up and spits out its artists. Muhammad and De la Puente build the book around Quest’s quest (ahem) to make it as an artist. They interviewed 22 anonymous artists and art world people for the book, and they use this material as the basis for a series of strange Ali Smith-esque vignettes that feature talking babies, zombies, a professor made out of discarded art, beheaded critics, and the ghost of Gustave Courbet, among other oddities. Short chapters on real pieces of contemporary art, often performances that critique the art world itself, are also interspersed, along with references to real artists, galleries and people.

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Booksellers chose true-crime inspired Butter by Asako Yuzuki as book of the year, while Ross Montgomery’s fun adventure I Am Rebel took the children’s prize

A novel about a serial killer and a children’s book about a dog are the books of 2024, according to Waterstones booksellers.

Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, has been voted book of the year, while I am Rebel by Ross Montgomery has been named children’s book of the year.

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Murakami revisits a hypnotic city of dreams, in material he’s been working on for four decades

The elegiac quality of Haruki Murakami’s new novel, his first in six years, was perhaps inevitable considering its origins. The City and Its Uncertain Walls began as an attempt to rework a 1980 story of the same title, originally published in the Japanese magazine Bungakukai, which Murakami, unsatisfied, never allowed to be republished or translated.

“I felt that this work contained something vital for me,” Murakami writes in the novel’s afterword, “at the time, though, unfortunately I lacked the skills to convey what that something was.” Five years later, his first attempt at a revision developed into the novel Hard‑Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a narrative that ran “parallel” to the original – “like two crews digging a tunnel, one from each end, breaking through and meeting up in the exact middle”. Yet still, Murakami writes, the story “bothered” him. And so 35 years later, as the Covid-19 pandemic began in earnest, Murakami circled back to the material again, spending three years expanding it into this lengthy tripartite novel, now translated into English by Philip Gabriel.

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Lord of the Rings author’s three-volume collection will reach bookshops 50 years after his death

He is one of the world’s most famous novelists, with more than 150m copies of his fantasy masterpieces sold across the globe, but JRR Tolkien always dreamed of finding recognition as a poet.

Tolkein struggled to publish his poetry collections during his career, although he included nearly 100 poems in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings .

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The follow-up to Small Pleasures is set in a mid-century psychiatric hospital, as an art therapist delves into a patient’s past

Following up a dark horse triumph such as Clare Chambers’s 2020 novel Small Pleasures can present a challenge. Chambers had been steadily but quietly published, and then had a gap of almost a decade before that breakthrough ninth novel became a critical and word-of-mouth hit. Longlisted for the Women’s prize, this quietly dazzling work was rightly acknowledged as a small masterpiece.

Her 10th novel, Shy Creatures, confirms her as one of our most talented writers, inhabiting something of the territory of Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Taylor and placing her outside contemporary fashions, although there are echoes of Tessa Hadley and Sarah Waters. Shy Creatures returns to the mid-century, profoundly English suburbia of Small Pleasures, is also inspired by a real event, and is sometimes slower but just as quirky, acutely observed and beautifully written as its predecessor.

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Succession actor Harriet Walter narrates this unsettling portrait of class, memory and the nature of fiction

Ian McEwan’s masterly examination of memory and imagination, nominated for the Booker prize in 2001, opens at a gathering of the Tallis family at their country pile, where the youngest daughter Briony is recruiting her cousins to perform in a play. It is a baking hot summer in 1935 and 13-year-old Briony, who has a thirst for drama, is irked when the others don’t share her enthusiasm for performance.

Then she witnesses a disturbing scene from her bedroom window. Her sister Cecilia and Robbie, son of the Tallis’s charlady, are in heated conversation by the fountain in the garden, after which Cecilia strips to her underwear and submerges herself underwater for several seconds. Later that day, Robbie asks Bryony to pass on a letter to Cecilia in which he confesses his desire for her in explicit terms. Briony reads it and decides Robbie must be a wicked person, leading her to tell a lie that will have catastrophic consequences.

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