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Subverting conventions of plot construction as well as gender identity, Waidner amalgamates football lore, a reversed version of Kafka's "Process", Google Maps as a time-travelling device, and anti-queer violence expressed in spontaneously erupting bullfights, taking us on a near-psychedelic trip through migrant biographies, working class experience, time-tested friendship, and the struggle for respect and agency, if not justice in modern-day, hyper-unequal London. Highly recommended.

Equal parts Ballardian dreamscape and stream-of-consciousness commentary, Waldner's short novel is a sharp survey of queer working-class realities in a declining Britain. Concise and rich in references, they test and transcend the limits of conventional storytelling without ever losing touch with their proponents' perspective. Funny, sad and angry.

Piercy contrasts a disturbingly detailed portrait of poverty and powerlessness with an exploration of a more-than-humanist utopia and connects them in a celebration of interconnectedness and resistance. A classic and a call to arms.

Constantly switching between causal histories, close readings and caustic remarks, Sandifer fearlessly explores how (and why) we're fucked – how the the alt-right's (and, more fundamentally, capitalism's) lack of empathy and sheer stupidity are creating a "cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell-bent on going extinct".

When Sandifer traces the alt-right's recent (Gamergate) and ancient (Austrian Economics) history, the book is most readable; when she assembles an army of intellectual comrades to dismantle neo-reactionary narratives and rhetorics, it is most exhilarating (and exhausting). Horror and historical materialism are our main guides, crude psycho-analytical exegesis is more of a bonus and thankfully marked as such.

For me, the book achieves a rare confluence of intellectual rigour and rugged empathy, actively wielded weirdness and precisely channeled rage. Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will by way of William Blake and Alan Moore.

An epic adventure, a coming-of-age story, and a long hard look at slavery and white privilege.

A funny, sad and richly textured portrait of a struggling community in the crumbling and racist New York of 1969.