Your second chance to catch the books you might have missed last year.

Last year was one hell of a year for fiction. But it was also, let’s face it, one hell of a year for reality, during which even the most dedicated bookworm may have found it difficult to drag their eyes away from the newsfeed. With many essential titles resurfacing in paperback, now is the time to catch up on the best recent novels, from major award winners to future cult favourites and a canonical take on the refugee crisis. Missed 2017 in hardback? These five paperbacks could be just the pick-me-up your imagination needs this spring.

The Idiot by Ms Elif Batuman

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when email was a new and wondrous form of communication. When Harvard student Selin is given her first email address, she embarks on a crush affair – tentatively typed in green letters on a black screen – with a poetic Hungarian maths scholar. Packed with big ideas about language, literature and culture, the debut novel from Turkish-American New York journalist Ms Elif Batuman is an erudite yet hilarious epic about coming messily of age in the mid-1990s.

Exit West by Mr Mohsin Hamid

Hailed as an instant classic, this Man Booker-shortlisted novel from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a profound study of exile dotted with magical portals more reminiscent of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. Drawn together by their love of travel and weed, Saeed and Nadia fall in love as their city falls apart. Fleeing the violence through a mysterious door, the couple begin a life on the move. A rivetingly inventive and devastatingly reflective take on the refugee crisis.

**Reservoir 13 by Mr Jon McGregor **

This Costa Novel Award winner starts with a crime fiction cliché: a teenage girl has gone missing on the moors, and the quiet English village where her family were holidaying is soon overrun with police and press. You know the set-up, and wait tensely for a body to be found. But British author Mr Jon McGregor is more interested in time and transition than tragedy, writing with forensic focus about the continuing rhythms of human life and nature.

This Is Memorial Device by Mr David Keenan

You won’t have heard of This Is Memorial Device, the visionary post-punk band whose esoteric music ignited the youth of a small town in Lanarkshire between 1978 and 1986. But you’ll believe you have – and wish you had. The debut novel by Scottish music critic Mr David Keenan is a spoof oral history about the best band that never existed. But the joy, the sadness and the understanding of what it means to truly invest your life in art – they are entirely “4 Real”.

Lincoln In The Bardo by Mr George Saunders

Two days after the death of his young son from typhoid, Mr Abraham Lincoln visits the body in its marble crypt at Georgetown cemetery. Over the course of one night, a cacophony of ghosts attend the grieving president as he cradles his son in the bardo, the transitional space in Tibetan Buddhism between life and death. Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, this big, formally bold and brilliantly bonkers novel turned American short story writer Mr George Saunders into a Man Booker winner.

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