Set in Victorian England Fingersmith is that rare thing, a novel that is both literary and a page-turner with an astonishing twist.
Music and Silence is a formally complex novel with music as its thread, and is beautifully rendered.
More a mix of fiction and memoir than a true historical novel, Austerlitz meditates on time and loss in exploring a past in which a five-year-old is sent to England on a Kindertransport.
Pure, set in Paris in 1785, tells of the demolition of a vast and ancient graveyard and is so vividly evocative of its period it leaps from the page.