Fled

Meg Keneally

Zaffre

Based on the true story of convict Mary Bryant, Keneally’s debut begins in 1780s Cornwall, where poverty forces Jenny Trelawney to turn to highway robbery to feed her family. She’s caught, and sentenced to be transported to Australia, where another struggle for survival awaits. Not only does the governor of Sydney Cove enforce a strict regime, but famine hits the colony, leading to Trelawney’s decision to set out on a daring, potentially suicidal escape in an open boat on the open sea. In Jenny Trelawney, the author has created a strong, resourceful and tenacious character who uses every means at her disposal to survive, and it’s a hard book to stop reading. Keneally sets up a momentum that’s maintained through every stage of her journey – from a forest in Cornwall to her stint in a prison hulk, from giving birth on the long voyage to Australia to the privations of the colony itself – each location vividly realised.

Warlight

Michael Ondaatje

Vintage

In the war-torn London of 1945, 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister find themselves abandoned by their parents – who have supposedly gone to work in Singapore – and left in the care of their lodger, a mysterious character known as The Moth. The Moth introduces Nathaniel to a twilight world of shady activities populated by a colourful selection of characters, but such is the disruption the war has had on normal life that the boy accepts the strange situation quite easily, even if it doesn’t make much sense to him. Twelve years later, now working for the secret service, he tries to piece together what it was all about and what the absence of his parents actually meant. Enigmatic and evocative, Ondaatje’s book, which works as a spy novel too, has layers of memory, self-discovery and moral ambiguity to excavate, and there’s great satisfaction to be had in digging through them and seeing all the way to the foundations at last.

Leila

Prayaag Akbar

Faber

With a TV adaptation making its Netflix debut in June, Akbar’s first novel is set in a dystopian India where current trends have been taken to their natural conclusion. With hard-liners enforcing traditional values under the banner of “Purity for All”, the city in which narrator Shalini lives is divided into sectors guarded by armed thugs. So far, Shalini and husband Riz, a cosmopolitan Hindu-Muslim couple, have been protected by their wealth, but their daughter Leila’s third birthday party is invaded, Riz is killed and Shalini sent to a re-education camp, the child and her nanny escaping. Sixteen years later, after a gruelling period of internment, Shalini emerges, determined to track her daughter down. The elite to which Shalini belongs gets as much criticism as the fundamentalists in a novel that is basically a social critique posing as speculative fiction, but Akbar never lets the human element of a distraught woman in search of her daughter get lost among the politics.