Once the Star Wars tie-ins (my favourite was Slave to the Empire: An Erotic Star Wars Adventure) and novelty Christmas books for people who don’t read (remember A Simples Life: The Life and Times of Aleksandr Orlov?) are safely remaindered, it’s time to look ahead to 2016’s fiction lineup. After a vintage 2015, next year has much to live up to, and the early signs are good, with a particularly fine-looking collection of debut novels on offer.
One of the big publishing stories of last year was the phenomenal success of Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. Just as Hawkins’s novel was itself filling a Gone Girl-shaped hole in people’s reading lives, now comes The Widow (Bantam Press), Fiona Barton’s first novel, feted as this year’s The Girl on the Train. It’s just one of a host of hotly tipped debuts for 2016. Rebecca Mackenzie’s In a Land of Paper Gods (Headline), out in January, is set in a missionary school in China and carries echoes of Empire of the Sun and The Poisonwood Bible.
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