Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (Fourth Estate) by Rivka Galchen flew a bit under the radar, but it is a wise meditation on the kind of hysterical scapegoating we see so often in the age of the internet, though based on a historical fact: that the mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler was once accused of witchcraft. Everything about this book, from its structure to its prose to the way it hits a reader unawares in the second half, is testament to Lockwood’s wicked genius. I have been in headlong love with Patricia Lockwood’s hilarious and subversive mind since her memoir Priestdaddy, but her first novel, No One Is Talking About This(Bloomsbury), sent me reeling. Lauren Composite: Guardian/Invision/AP/PR Images Meg MasonĪuthor of Sorrow and Bliss (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) Along with her suburban housewife and lab-tested reptilian lover, Ingalls deftly, wittily and rather incredibly liberates readers from the awfulness of convention to a state where weirdness and otherness are beautiful and right. Reissued this year with impassioned praise from fellow authors such as Marlon James, Patricia Lockwood and Max Porter, Mrs Caliban (Faber) by Rachel Ingalls is a work of true verve and imagination. She also explores female loneliness and desire, accommodation of a male-designed world and the spaces where women hold power. Lasley infiltrates this masculine offshore industry, with its dangers, profit and comradeship. Part memoir, part investigation into oil-rig culture, part critique of gender and class dynamics, it’s incredibly compelling, often dark as the drilled-for product. Sea State (Fourth Estate) by Tabitha Lasley completely took me by surprise. Sarah Composite: Guardian/REX/Shutterstock/PR Images
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