The Sunday Times novel of the year

A Mercy by Toni Morrison (Chatto £15.99)

Published in the week that America elected its first black president, Morrison's magnificent novel could hardly be more timely. For it goes back to the start of the centuries of slavery and racist oppression that spread a stain across the nation for so long. Beginning in 1682, with a decent merchant being beguiled into the lucrative corruptions of the sugar-plantation trade, it unrolls a tale of the contaminating repercussions of enslavement, prejudice and possessiveness. Pioneer existence in 17th-century America is resurrected with wonderful immediacy. Characters taking turns to narrate what happens speak in voices rich with the idioms and concerns of the period. At once powerfully direct and engrossingly intricate, this is a masterpiece of rewarding complexity.

THE WHITE TIGER by ARAVIND ADIGA
Atlantic £12.99
Winner of this year's Man Booker prize, Adiga's first novel shrivels up picturesque fantasies about India. Gross gulfs between the rich and the destitute, institutionalised corruption, toxic caste prejudice and superstitious subservience are scorchingly surveyed in a black comedy white-hot with indignation.

BREATH by TIM WINTON
Picador £14.99
This novel hits you like a rush of adrenaline. Starting as a celebration of surfing's risky, addictive thrills, its story sends four characters spiralling into dark depths of experience. The setting, rendered with terrific immediacy, is Winton's home territory on Australia's west coast. Once again, he displays his exceptional power at conveying intense physical sensation while subtly exploring emotional and psychological complexities.

ALL OUR WORDLY GOODS by IRENE NEMIROVSKY
translated by Sandra Smith
Chatto £16.99
Opening on a fashionable beach in Normandy in 1911 and ending in the occupied France of 1940, this fine novel follows the fortunes and misfortunes of two bourgeois families in a town near the Somme. Encompassing the upheavals of two world wars as well as clashes between the generations, class struggles, social skirmishes and battles for money and power, its story - constantly revealing the precariousness of civilised stability - affords superb scope for Némirovsky's gripping narrative skills, empathy with a wide range of characters, unillusioned realism and ironic comedy.

INDIGNATION by PHILIP ROTH
Cape £16.99
In a streamlined novel that has the inexorable momentum of Greek tragedy, Roth harks back to America at the time of the Korean war. Amid scenes sardonically exposing snobbery and bigotry in an affluent Wasp college in the Midwest, his idealistic young hero (a casualty of ill chance, cruel ironies and his fatal flaw of unguarded indignation) is impelled towards the slaughter fields of the Far East. A taut masterwork that resonates with all the skills of a veteran novelist on top form.

GOD'S OWN COUNTRY by ROSS RAISIN
Viking £14.99
A debut novel with a strikingly original voice. Bristling with dialect words and regional idioms, the mocking commentary that a young misfit trains on the incomers and eco-minded types colonising the Yorkshire moors around his family's farm proves both brilliantly funny and balefully indicative of his increasingly disturbed state.

REVELATION by CJ SANSOM
Macmillan £12.99
Terror stalks Tudor London in this latest pungently atmospheric novel from the master of the historical murder mystery. In a snow-encrusted city littered with derelict churches and half-demolished monasteries, a psychopath is gruesomely performing killings that imitate torments prophesied in the Book of Revelation. As the body-count mounts, Sansom brings the period pulsingly alive, and his lawyer-sleuth Matthew Shardlake is faced with the most formidable challenge yet to his powers of detection.

DEAF SENTENCE by DAVID LODGE
Harvill Secker £17.99
Since it deals with loss - of hearing, of professional purposefulness and of a parent - this might seem likely to be a spirit-lowering read. In fact, Lodge's satiric flair, acute perceptions and keen involvement with his characters make it exhilaratingly entertaining and thought-provoking.

THE BROKEN WORD by ADAM FOULDS
Cape £9
A dazzling display of what verse fiction can do. In just 60 pages or so, Foulds (focusing on a son's return to his family's East African farm before going up to Cambridge) re-creates colonial Kenya as the 1950s Mau Mau uprising gets underway. Place and period are evoked with uncanny accomplishment; barbarities on both sides are caught with graphic concision. A tour de force of pared-down narrative, this is a work that merges emotional force and imaginative finesse.

THE SPARE ROOM by HELEN GARNER
Canongate £12.99
This novel's extraordinary feat is to be at once affecting, involving and sharply funny as its narrator Helen struggles to support an old friend, Nicola, stricken with terminal cancer but determined to defy it by recklessly pursuing alternative therapies and manically persisting in flighty denial about her plight.

THE BELIEVERS by ZOE HELLER
Fig Tree £16.99
As Joel Litvinoff, a bullishly egomaniacal New York lawyer and radical campaigner, lies dying, his children's lives branch out in unexpected directions. Following them from raunchy danceroutine rehearsals in an East Harlem GirlPower centre to the cramped rituals of an ultra-orthodox rabbi's household during the Sabbath, Heller's stylish novel (at whose centre is a compelling comic monster, Joel's acrid-mouthed wife) sizzles with astringent wit.

HOME by MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Virago £16.99
The return of the black sheep of the family to an elderly minister's house in 1950s small-town Iowa is the starting-point for a reworking of the story of the Prodigal Son. In its engrossing emotional and psychological nuance, it outdoes Robinson's acclaimed Gilead, to which it is a companion volume.

HIS ILLEGAL SELF by PETER CAREY
Faber £16.99
Travelling from the swanky purlieus of Manhattan's Upper East Side to a ramshackle hippie commune in Queensland's steamy jungle, Carey elatingly follows two unlikely outlaws on the run. Nicely gauged satire, ebullient narrative drive and headily sensuous writing make the book irresistibly compelling.

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