We Are Not in the World: Fleeting lives caught in passingLike his poetry, Conor O’Callaghan’s novel about the refugee crisis is delicately written and hauntingly imagined
The Secret Guests: Banville’s royal ramblings are a rich delightFiction: Writing as BW Black, the Irish novelist throws another literary curveball with a counterfactual historical romance
A Very Stable Genius: An eerie insider’s view of the telly addict in the White HousePolitics: Two Washington Post writers have produced an unnerving, unintentionally funny portrait of a man profoundly in the wrong job – and a nation governed by his TV set
Book review: Serotonin by Michel HouellebecqHouellebecq’s squalid satire sinks into shallow self-parody
Book review: Akin by Emma DonoghueAnother tale of love and parenthood from a novelist at the height of her powers
This study of the 1960s is a trip worth takingCharles Manson was – as The Bad Trip, James Riley’s excellent new cultural history of the 1960s, makes clear – the embodiment of a decade marked by violence, disorder and fear
A flawed but fascinating return by an Irish writer like few othersNight Boat to Tangier isn’t like anything else you’ve ever read. Summoning a haunted, off-kilter world of loneliness and regret, it lingers powerfully in the mind
Uneven Scandi thriller loses its way after a hundred pagesFor its first hundred or so pages, Niklas Natt och Dag’s debut novel is a publisher’s (and a reader’s) dream, but then it all goes awry
McNamee’s gift for intense imagery sets a most atmospheric moodYou don’t really read Eoin McNamee for his plots – though he is superbly good at them, and can nudge a gripping conspiracy thriller to life with just the right touches of jittery menace. You read him for his sentences