LORRIE MOORE'S The Collected Stories (Faber and Faber, buy it here) are concerned with death, divorce and loneliness, and she observes with such diamond-pointed accuracy that they are painfully funny without being remotely comical. This large and splendid volume contains all Moore's stories since 1985, with three previously uncollec-ted tales from The New Yorker. Paper Losses is the often hilarious account of a broken marriage, from which the husband is gradually withdrawing. “It was like being snowbound with someone's demented uncle.”

Elizabeth Jane Howard's Love All (Macmillan, buy it here) is one of her elegant, crafty dissections of a family. The Musgrove siblings, Thomas and Mary, are decaying gentry in a quaint West Country village. Their ancestral home has been bought by a downmarket millionaire (it's the 1960s, when that meant something), and into their lives comes the lovely young Persephone Plover. This is classic Howard, to be read for the sheer beauty of her writing.

And Fay Weldon, another literary grande dame, has emerged from a long period of dotty unreadability with The Stepmother's Diary (Quercus, buy it here), a blistering look at the battle between a woman and her stepdaughter. Emily, a psychoanalyst (FW's pet hate), is reading the diary of her daughter Sappho, who is fighting stepdaughter Isobel for her husband's limited attention. A fiendish modern morality tale - the old Cassandra is back in superb form.

It was a great year for grizzled prophets. Philip Roth's Indignation (Jonathan Cape, buy it here) is an extraordinary, compact story that begins with a quotation from e.e.cummings - “there is some shit I will not eat”. It is 1951, the second year of the Korean War. Marcus Messner is a serious boy, studying at a college far from home to get away from his over-anxious parents. We learn, early on, that he has been killed in the war - how did it happen? A brilliant riff on the old saying that we all have to eat a peck of dirt before we die.

“Deafness is a kind of pre-death,” says the narrator in David Lodge's Deaf Sentence (Harvill Secker, buy it here); “a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse”. Desmond Bates, a professor of linguistics, has taken early retirement because of his increasing deafness. He's trying to come to terms with his mortality while taking care of his ancient father. As you'd expect, Lodge's meditations on deafness are both harsh and funny. And you have to love the way he rejects a tiresome female stal-ker: “I'm afraid I could never trust anyone who would make irremovable marks in a library book.”

Will Self's Liver (Viking, buy it here) is a collection of four stories concerned with that useful organ. There's a Promethean adman whose liver is eaten by a vulture thrice daily, a woman with liver cancer who is going to Switzerland to die, and a group of colourful alkies who gather at a dusty, sleazy club in Soho as their livers gradually turn to pâté. Self is a superb stylist and the laureate of substance abuse, and these hepatic rhapsodies contain some of his most inventive writing.

There is no sleaze in Home (Virago, buy it here), Marilynne Robinson's tender and exquisite follow-up to Gilead. Jack is the prodigal son of the Boughton family, and the best loved. After 20 years in the wilderness, he has returned to the house of his father to make his peace with the past. But his good sister Glory is also at home, and can't bear to see her “poor scoundrel brother” getting the fatted calf. Robinson is highly sensitive to the dynamics of a family, and has an unerring instinct for the ordinary tragedies of life.

It was a good year for the big guns, but there were also some stunning new voices. A Fraction of the Whole (Hamish Hamilton, buy it here), shortlisted for the Booker, is a breathtaking, barmy, brutally funny 700-page first novel, by a scarily talented Australian named Steve Toltz. Jasper Deans has been raised by a father who tried to keep him in intellectual captivity. Martin snatched his small son out of school, fearing “that he was leaving my impressionable brain ‘in the folds of Satan's underpants'”. Now that the toxic old nutcase is dead, Jasper tries to make sense of their relationship - and it's a journey that takes him all over the world, through whole galleries of grotesques.

The principal grotesque in Rose Heiney's The Days of Judy B (Short Books, buy it here) is Judy B herself. She's 23, and a successful journalist - “everyone's third-favourite light-hearted columnist”, who writes about her fab life of sex, booze and parties. The real Judy, however, is a fat agoraphobic who longs for a career in musical theatre. It's a very clever satire about the portrayal of women in the media, but it goes beyond that as Judy reveals the bereavement that sent her into self-imposed exile. When publishers' lists glitter with fool's gold, it is reassuring to catch gleams of the real thing.

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