BEST

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

Roy returns to fiction after 20 years with this magnificent, sweeping work about a divided India, from the military occupation of Kashmir to the conflict between Hindus and Muslims. A motley crew of characters - a middle-aged transgender woman who lives in a graveyard, a low-caste Hindu who decides to call himself Saddam Hussein, an enigmatic woman with ties to Kashmiri rebels - is brought together by the discovery of a dark-skinned baby abandoned at a protest site.

Through splendid chaos, it endeavours to tell the many stories of a country in pieces.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

In an unnamed country on the brink of civil war, a young Muslim couple begin looking for a way out of their collapsing society. They find it through a mysterious door in a dentist's office, one of many such portals opening up to migrants across the world.

Pakistani author Hamid's fluid, fantastical take on the global refugee crisis is a layered and, ultimately, hopeful ode to migration.

Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders

The American short story maestro's highly experimental debut novel was rewarded with this year's Man Booker Prize.

This strange, transcendent work takes place in a cemetery after the entombing of 11-year-old Willie Lincoln, son of United States President Abraham Lincoln.

Featuring a staggering 166 voices - the ghosts of reverends, soldiers and slaves, as well as Lincoln himself - this meditation on death and love achieves far more than the sum of its very many parts.