Scottist novelist Mr Irvine Welsh once memorably dismissed the Booker Prize as being obsessed with “upper-class Englishness”. Last year, at least, he was proven wrong. Fellow Scot Mr Douglas Stuart’s winning debut novel, Shuggie Bain, throws us straight into 1980s working class Glasgow, and a tender mother-son relationship playing out in a household besieged by poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence. It’s not quite Trainspotting, but it shares something of that book’s squalid beauty – you can read about how photography from the era inspired Stuart here – and the ability to land a scene like a punch to the jaw.

A bit of a sleeper hit this year, 27-year-old British-Ghanaian Mr Caleb Azumah Nelson’s slim, sexy debut tells a story as old as time, about two teenagers falling into something between lust and love in pre-pandemic south London. The prose has won acclaim for its mature, measured style, but it’s what Nelson – a photographer as well as a writer – captures in the background of his story that makes it such a pleasure to read; the hustle and throb of the city, and a joyous celebration of Black artistry.

Long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, another debut – this time from American writer Ms Torrey Peters – Detransition, Baby is a whip-smart novel about gender and parental longing. We meet Reese, a trans woman trying to become a mother; Ames, who lived as a trans woman before detransitioning to live again as male; and Katrina, the woman pregnant with Ames’ child. When an unconventional parenting arrangement between the three of them begins, our story is under way.

Here’s a book that ticks every box from what you want in a Great American Novel: epic in scope, brilliantly written and pertinent to the issues of the day. Desiree and Stella are identical, light-skinned Black twin sisters growing up in Louisiana in the 1940s. Aged 16, they run away together to New Orleans and become estranged. Many years later, Desiree’s daughter comes across her mother’s doppelganger: her aunt, now passing as a white woman. There’s good reason why The Vanishing Half was one of the critical and commercial hits of 2020 that continues to resonate with readers.

The emptiness of late capitalism and individual success has inspired great writers for decades, from Ms Jennifer Egan to Mr Chuck Palahniuk. Ms Natasha Brown’s nimble debut – about a successful young banker who discovers she has cancer – adds a British perspective, specifically the unwinnable game of being a young, Black woman navigating a world of white, moneyed privilege. Not for nothing is Assembly one of the most talked-about debuts of the year; plus, at just 100 pages long, you can finish it easily between checking on your crypto investments.

Now for something truly different from the Netherlands, where a debut novel you won’t want to read over lunch has been a surprise hit, as well as winning the International Booker prize. The Discomfort Of Evening charts the complete mental collapse of a pious farming family in the aftermath of a boy’s accidental death, told through eerily plain recollections of his 10-year-old sister. Full of blood, snot and excrement – watch out for scenes involving agricultural machinery – there is a touch of early Mr Iain Banks here, but Rijneveld will be one of the most original voices you discover this year.

“Is Black Buck the first racial satire that’s also self-help?” asked the LA Times in December last year. Well, it’s certainly the former, following a 20-something narrator called Darren who is forced to endure the low-level racism and microaggressions of a New York tech startup, in this case offering “emotional and spiritual support services” to major corporations. The self-help claim comes from the fact that Askaripour apparently believes his book can help people become better at sales. We’ll leave that for you to decide, but as a plain old novel, it’s a doozy.

Few writers have endured the slings and arrows of Britain’s tedious “culture wars” more than The Times journalist Mr Sathnam Sanghera this year, whose lucid, balanced and thoughtful account of the history of the British Empire was met by a barrage of online trolling typified by the opposite qualities. Never mind: if you want to cut through the noise and read a rigorously researched, eye-opening look at the nation’s past, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain is the book for you.

Anyone who has read Say Nothing, his masterful 2019 account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, will know Mr Patrick Radden Keefe as a reporter at the very top of his game. His latest subject is the mysterious Sackler family, a pharmaceutical dynasty that sits at the heart of the opioid epidemic that has ravaged the US and claimed at least half a million lives. It’s a gripping story and, given the way we have all been forced to reassess our relationship to our health recently, a timely one.

Ms Rachel Kushner once rode a motorbike in an illegal 1,000-mile race across the Baja Peninsula and crashed at 140mph; if living life to the fullest is prerequisite for being a great writer, then the 52-year-old American has gone about things the right way. The celebrated author of novels The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers, Kushner’s first essay collection jostled through the colourful events and characters that have informed her fiction. It’s quite the ride.

For our money one of the most eloquent and inspiring memoirs of recent years, Mr Mohsin Zaidi recounts growing up in a devout Muslim household while struggling to come to terms with being gay. Despite this, he wins a place at Oxford and becomes an accomplished criminal barrister before reconciling his self-identity, his past and his present. A Dutiful Boy is real-life storytelling at its finest.

Just when it looked like there were no more books to wring from the “antarctic adventure” genre, New Yorker writer Mr Julian Sancton delivers the surprisingly untold story of the Belgica, a ship that set off to the South Pole in 1897 before getting trapped for months in the polar darkness. Madness, mysterious illnesses and devious plots ensue among the superbly captured cast – that’s when they’re not out hunting penguins for food.

The Times journalist Mr Ben Machell takes a break from being very funny on Twitter to tell the kind of true story that many hacks dream of discovering. It centres around Mr Stephen Jackley, a 20-year-old geography student from Devon who, in an attempt to fight poverty and injustice, decided in 2007 to become a bank robber – not in some smart, online, data-hacking sense, but in the traditional, replica pistol and cunning disguise one. A brilliantly told Robin Hood story.

Have you ever been the guy in the meeting talking over his female colleague? We should think not. But that’s only one small part of the story, argues journalist Ms Mary Ann Seighart, of how gender discrimination manifests both in the workplace and in public life. There has been a lot of required reading for men since #MeToo, but this is not simply a duty read; like Invisible Women by Ms Caroline Criado Perez, it’s an eye-opening and thought-provoking insight that goes far beyond what you already think you know.

In the tense early months of 2020, when everyone was joking about the deluge of “lockdown novels” being written in spare bedrooms across the country, Ms Zadie Smith, one of Britain’s finest novelists, was writing to help her make sense of the Covid crisis. The result is Intimations, a collection of essays that packs a hefty punch, drawing on Smith’s unique gift for balancing intellectual curiosity, emotional ambivalence and wry insight. As a way of drawing a therapeutic line under The Worst Year Ever, this is just the ticket.