2020 ended up being a decent year for the publishing trade, at least as far as book sales went. Perhaps we also learned to cherish our bookshops and literary festivals – vital elements of our cultural lives whose absence for much of the year was painful to endure. The loss of these forums for discovering new books caused publishers to delay the release of many titles until 2021. So it’s a massive year of fiction ahead, meaning that I’ll concentrate here on books published in the first six months (with a brief nod to autumn titles from Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead and a new Sebastian Faulks novel, Snow Country (Hutchinson), coming in September). I’ll also leave first novels to the Observer New Review’s superb debut feature. First up, I’m struck by the fact that two of the best American novels of the year are written by Brits. Tahmima Anam’s The Startup Wife (Canongate, June) is a brilliant and trenchant portrait of hi-tech America’s frat-boy misogyny, and Jonathan Lee is quietly becoming one of the best young novelists on either side of the Atlantic. His fourth book, The Great Mistake (Granta, June), is a sweeping historical novel that is also a gripping mystery. As far as American novels by actual Americans go, there’s We Run the Tides (Atlantic, February) by Vendela Vida, a dreamily evocative story of California, adolescence and grief. Also look out for The Committed (Black Cat, March) by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the lyrical sequel to his Pulitzer-winning debut, The Sympathiser. I’ve always thought the Encore award – for the best second novel – a very good thing. Debuts are easy compared with the anxious slog of a follow-up and yet 2021 holds a positive trove of sophomore gems. For starters, there’s Lisa Harding’s quietly devastating Bright Burning Things (Bloomsbury, March), which reminded me repeatedly of Shuggie Bain, a tight, beautifully written portrait of motherhood and loss. It’s hard to believe it’s only his second novel, but 13 years after The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall comes back with another dazzlingly smart postmodern treat. Maxwell’s Demon (Canongate, February) is both steeped in high European theory – think Calvino and Eco – and enormously enjoyable. Continuing the second novel blitz, Fiona Mozley’s Hot Stew (John Murray, March) is another absurdly good read. In the first few pages, she moves from a snail escaping a pot of escargots to a multi-century history of Soho before settling down to tell a rollicking tale of pimps and prostitutes, property and posterity. Olivia Sudjic’s second novel, Asylum Road (Bloomsbury, January), carries echoes of Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk. It’s a book about love and history, trauma and identity. Venetia Welby’s exquisite and hallucinogenic Dreamtime (Quartet, April) is set in a near future in which we have lost the battle against climate change. Finally, there’s Francis Spufford, whose debut, Golden Hill, was one of my favourite books of the past decade. He’s followed it up with another absolute banger. Light Perpetual (Faber, February) is a high-concept work – think Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life and Paul Auster’s 4321. It’s about a bomb falling on London in 1944, about parallel lives, about the many what-might-have-beens. This year, I’ve longed for books of wide-ranging and spectacular imagination. Spufford’s masterpiece certainly scratched that itch. I haven’t read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (Faber, March) yet, but I have a feeling that it will be similarly visionary. Here are a few more that will be a balm in the depths of a tier 4 winter. Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth (William Heinemann, January) reminded me of one of my favourite novels, Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. Set in an Edinburgh tenement, it leaps across decades to tell the story of the curse that haunts No 10 Luckenbooth Close and its eccentric inhabitants. Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time (Canongate, January) is a vast and wildly ambitious piece of speculative fiction that asks what the world would look like if slavery and colonialism never existed. CJ Carey’s Widowland (Quercus, June) is a smart and gripping piece of alternative history set in the postwar reign of Edward VIII. Finally – and this may sound strange as a novel to provide an escape from the miseries of 2020 –, I loved Christopher Wilson’s ribald yet deeply touching Hurdy Gurdy (Faber, January), the story of the genial Brother Diggory as he tends the victims of the plague in 14th-century England. In translation, I read two magical Japanese novels. First, there’s Lonely Castle in the Mirror (Doubleday, April) by Mizuki Tsujimura (translated by Philip Gabriel). Part Miyazaki fairytale, part teen romance, it’s strange and beautiful – imagine the offspring of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and The Virgin Suicides. Maki Kashimada’s Touring the Land of the Dead (Europa Editions, April), translated by Haydn Trowell, asks whether places are haunted by their own pasts. Charco Press publishes dependably excellent books. Now Julián Fuks, whose Resistance was a huge success a few years back, returns with another intricate and big-hearted novel of São Paolo, family, hope and despair called Occupation. It’s again translated, impeccably, by the great Daniel Hahn. Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest, Whereabouts (Bloomsbury, April), was originally composed in Italian, which the author only learned in recent years, then translated back into English. It gives a strange new texture to the work of this supremely talented writer. A final few books to look forward to in a year that has a lot of making up to do. Niven Govinden’s Diary of a Film (Dialogue, February), his sixth novel, is also his best yet. Smart, sexy and cinematic (in many senses), it is a love letter to Italy and to film. Speaking of ekphrasis, Max Porter brings us The Death of Francis Bacon (Faber, January), a luminous novelette composed of seven pictures described in prose that seeks to elide the boundary between literature and visual art. I also loved The Lamplighters (Picador, March) by Emma Stonex – lighthouse keepers, ghosts, warring widows. It’s a wonderfully smart and atmospheric story. Marika Cobbold’s On Hampstead Heath (Arcadia, April) is a gentler affair. A mystery and an elegy for the death of old-fashioned journalism, it’s a book that will warm your heart. The same, eventually, is true of Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms (Granta, April), about the relationship between a damaged girl and her appalling parents. Finally, the great Jon McGregor returns with his fifth novel, Lean Fall Stand (4th Estate, April). It’s a genuine masterpiece: poised, multilayered and full of the most astonishingly beautiful prose. If 2021 is as good as its novels, we’ve got a lot to look forward to.