January

• Hisham Matar’s novel The Friends (Viking) is about three Libyan friends living in exile. Khaled and Mustafa meet at Edinburgh university. When they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy their lives are changed forever. The pair and Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history.

• Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld (Viking) explores the legacies of British empire across the globe – from the creation of tea plantations to environmental destruction, conservation and the imperial connotations of Royal tours. His journey takes him from Barbados and Mauritius to India and Nigeria and beyond. Sanghera demonstrates how deeply British imperialism is baked into our world. And why it’s time Britain was finally honest with itself about empire.

February

• Lucy Ashe’s The Sleeping Beauties (Magpie) is a tale of obsession, jealousy and heartache, set against the backdrop of post-war London. In May 1945, as Rosamund Caradon returns the last evacuees to London from her Devonshire home, she vows to protect her dance-obsessed daughter Jasmine from further peril. But a chance meeting with a Sadler’s Wells ballet dancer changes everything.

• Pity (Canongate) Andrew McMillan’s debut novel is set across three generations of a South Yorkshire mining family and explores community and masculinity. Brothers Alex and Brian have spent their whole life in the same town. Alex, is now middle-aged, and must reckon with a part of his identity he has long tried to mask. His son Alex works in a call centre with a side hustle in sex work and weekly drag gigs.

• In Sarah Marsh’s A Sign of Her Own (Tinder Press) Ellen Lark is deaf and a former student of Alexander Graham Bell’s technique known as Visible Speech. Bell dreams of producing a device that transmits the human voice along a wire and wants Ellen to support his patent to the telephone. But Ellen has a different story to tell.

• In Keir Starmer: The Biography (William Collins), Tom Baldwin examines the paradox of a politician often uncomfortable with politics. The book is the result of more than 100 hours of interviews with Starmer, his family, closest friends and most senior lieutenants, as well as opponents from the Conservative Party and within his own.

March

• When Susan Smillie, former Guardian journalist quit her job and set sail on her beloved sailboat, Isean, she was unaware that this spontaneous departure would lead to a three-year journey spanning several countries. Her account, The Half Bird (Michael Joseph) describes the physical and navigational challenges and an inner journey that took place along the way.

• An age-old subject is given new perspectives in Simon Armitage’s collection of 22 poems. Illustrated by Angela Harding, Blossomise (Faber) celebrates the ecstatic arrival of spring blossom and acknowledges its melancholy disappearance. From a crashed Ford Capri wrapped around the immovable trunk of a cherry tree, to saplings flourishing among urban sprawl, the fizz and froth of the annual blossom display is explored as an exuberant emblem of the natural world and a marker of our vulnerable climate.

April

• A new novel by David Nicholls is always a treat. You Are Here (Sceptre) is a story of first encounters, second chances and finding the way home. Marnie is stuck working alone in her London flat, battling long afternoons and a life that feels like it’s passing her by. Michael is reeling from his wife’s departure. Increasingly reclusive, he takes long, solitary walks across the moors and fells. Inevitably the pair meet.

• Track Record: Me, Music, and the War on Blackness by George the Poet (Hodder) is part memoir, part interrogation of politics, power, capitalism, and race, and a powerful and brutally honest look at the world in which we live. Tracing his own personal journey, from his experiences at Cambridge University to making it in the music industry, George explores some of the big issues facing society today.

• In This is Why You Dream (Cornerstone) neurosurgeon Rahul Jandial describes the astonishing impact that dreams have on our waking life. He explains how dreaming of an exam might help you score up to 20 per cent higher, why taking a long nap could make you better at problem solving, and that certain dream disorders can warn you of diseases like Parkinson’s years ahead of other symptoms. He offers compelling advice to better understand dreaming patterns and how to unleash their creative power.

• Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel, Caledonian Road (Faber) follows one man’s fall from grace. Campbell Flynn, a middle-aged art historian and celebrity intellectual, doesn’t take people seriously. Milo Mangasha, his provocative student, has ideas which excite his teacher. Over the course of an incendiary year, a web of crimes, secrets and scandals are revealed.

May

• In The Giant on the Skyline: On Home, Belonging and Learning to Let Go (Doubleday), Clover Stroud explores a landscape that has drawn people to it for generations. When Stroud has to uproot her youngest children from their rural life near the ancient Ridgeway in Oxfordshire to move to Washington DC, she sets out to explore her home, to understand the history of its landscape and why it is so hard for her to leave.

• Lianne Dillsworth’s House of Shades (Hutchinson Heinemann) is set in London, 1833. Doctress Hester Reeves has been offered a life-changing commission. She must leave behind her husband and their canal-side home in King’s Cross and move to Tall Trees – a dark and foreboding house in Fitzrovia. If Hester can cure the ailing health of its owner she will receive a life-changing payment.

• In Naked Portrait (Picador) Rose Boyt examines her complicated relationship with her father, Lucian Freud, through the diary she found after his death and her memories of sitting for him. What emerges is her love and compassion for herself as a vulnerable young woman and him.

June

• Shani Akilah’s short story collection, For Such a Time as This (Magpie) portrays the lives of black-British Londoners as they navigate friendship and romance, community and independence, and find their way through relationships that break them, shape them, and sustain them through good times and bad.

• In March 2020, Ben Masters’ father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was never happier than when outdoors, and spent his free time chasing butterflies. Blending memoir with nature writing, literary biography and pop-cultural history, The Flitting (Granta) explores loss and grief and how moments of trauma can trigger poignant transformations.

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