There were mighty tomes from Donna Tartt and Eleanor Catton, pastiches for lovers of Bond and Wodehouse, and a final novel from Iain Banks. We look back at the year's big hitters
Assured and witty … Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Photograph: Rex
Two novels will loom large under Christmas trees this year: Eleanor Catton's record-breaking Booker winner (longest novel, youngest author) The Luminaries (Granta), and Donna Tartt's vast study of art and loss, The Goldfinch (Little, Brown). Tartt's story of a young boy whose life is knocked off course by the loss of his mother is only her third book, and a decade in the writing. She has described her fiction as "painting wall-size murals with a brush the size of an eyelash", and The Goldfinch combines narrative grandeur with dazzling detail. The Luminaries is a similarly involving read – like a Wilkie Collins mystery set against the New Zealand gold rush – which slowly reveals a complex structure raising questions about fate, free will and the human search for meaning.
Other notable big reads this year included Karl Ove Knausgaard's autobiographical novel A Man in Love (Vintage), a brutally honest self-examination in what feels like real time, and Philipp Meyer's extraordinary epic of family, power and violence in the American west, The Son (Simon & Schuster). It was a strong year for American fiction generally, with Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers (Harvill Secker) introducing a fresh new voice, Thomas Pynchon riffing on the internet's early days in Bleeding Edge (Jonathan Cape), and Dave Eggers publishing not one but two critiques of the faltering American dream: The Circle (Hamish Hamilton), his second novel this year, is a compelling dystopian parable about the dangers of giving over our hearts and souls to Facebook, Twitter et al. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (Fourth Estate), meanwhile, Ifemelu leaves Nigeria and her husband-to-be behind for an assured and witty exploration of love, ambition, globalisation and the meaning of home.More
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