Once the Star Wars tie-ins (my favourite was Slave to the Empire: An Erotic Star Wars Adventure) and novelty Christmas books for people who don’t read (remember A Simples Life: The Life and Times of Aleksandr Orlov?) are safely remaindered, it’s time to look ahead to 2016’s fiction lineup. After a vintage 2015, next year has much to live up to, and the early signs are good, with a particularly fine-looking collection of debut novels on offer.

One of the big publishing stories of last year was the phenomenal success of Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train. Just as Hawkins’s novel was itself filling a Gone Girl-shaped hole in people’s reading lives, now comes The Widow (Bantam Press), Fiona Barton’s first novel, feted as this year’s The Girl on the Train. It’s just one of a host of hotly tipped debuts for 2016. Rebecca Mackenzie’s In a Land of Paper Gods (Headline), out in January, is set in a missionary school in China and carries echoes of Empire of the Sun and The Poisonwood Bible.

You should also look out for The Trouble With Goats and Sheep (HarperCollins) by Joanna Cannon, a blackly comic novel of 1970s life that comes garlanded with praise from the likes of Nathan Filer and Rachel Joyce. I was lucky enough to read an early proof of Jem Lester’s Shtum (April). It’s a darker, sadder version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but just as moving. There’s also a first full-length work from Adam Biles: Feeding Time, published by the excellent Galley Beggar Press, is a scintillating novel of ideas about an ageing world.

It’s not quite a debut, but children’s author Meg Rosoff’s first adult novel, Jonathan Unleashed (Bloomsbury, February), is set among the dog walkers of New York; it’s very smart and extremely funny. There’s also a first novel from critic and journalist Natasha Walter. Released in June, A Quiet Life (Borough Press) is inspired by the life of Melinda Marling, the wife of Cambridge spy Donald Maclean. It’s at once a heart-stopping cold war thriller and a profound study of one woman’s struggle for survival. Walter is a former Man Booker judge and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see her on the shortlist come autumn.

Speaking of Booker winners, Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape), his first novel since 2011’s The Sense of an Ending, hits the shelves in January. It’s a reimagining of the life of Shostakovich, detailing the composer’s torturous relationship with the Soviet authorities. With hints of JM Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, it’s a story of carefully sculpted brilliance – don’t rule out another Booker appearance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sets hearts aflutter … Don DeLillo. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday (Scribner, February), is brief, chapterless and very good – a novel of love and loss written in controlled and lapidary prose. There’s also Howard Jacobson’s retelling of The Merchant of Venice to look forward to: Shylock Is My Name (Vintage) is the next in a series begun with Jeanette Winterson’s flawed but fascinating rewriting of The Winter’s Tale – The Gap of Time.

A new Don DeLillo novel always sets the heart aflutter: Zero K (Picador, May), is about euthanasia and cryogenics and is icy, mordant and dazzling. There was once a time when a new John Irving novel would have been greeted with similar excitement; after a string of recent books veering from forgettable to embarrassing, it’s hard to believe that the latest, Avenue of Mysteries (Doubleday), will hit the heights of A Prayer for Owen Meany or The World According to Garp. Ditto the new Yann Martel; The High Mountains of Portugal (Canongate)is thought to be more Beatrice and Virgil than Life of Pi. I’d rather settle down with the latest in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s genre-busting My Struggle series. Some Rain Must Fall (Vintage), his fifth, is released in March.

It has been six years since the last fiction from the superlative Geoff Dyer. Initially called Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, it has been renamed White Sands (Canongate) because, according to the author, “the title was so long even I couldn’t remember it”. Dyer’s novel ought to be the high point of a thrilling spring that sees the new Nicola Barker, The Cauliflower (Cornerstone), a fractured fictional biography of a guru named Sri Ramakrishna; a wonderful-sounding speculative work by Naomi Alderman called The Power (Penguin), which imagines what would happen if women were physically stronger than men; and the third novel from Tahmima Anam, The Bones of Grace (Canongate), a restrained and powerful book about shipbreaking and love across continents.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Excellent short stories … Helen Oyeyemi. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Mussolini’s Italy has been the setting for a slew of excellent historical novels in the last few years – from Adam Foulds, Glenn Haybittle and Virginia Baily, among others. Now, Louisa Young, author of My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, takes on the subject with Devotion (Borough Press), a sumptuous portrayal of love and war in fascist Rome. Anthony Quinn follows up his successful 30s mystery Curtain Call with Freya (Jonathan Cape), a story of one woman’s life in the second half of the 20th century that has drawn comparisons to William Boyd. Then there’s Conspiracy (HarperCollins), the latest in the hugely enjoyable series of historical thrillers by SJ Parris.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The year for critical recognition? China Miéville. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty was one of the most frantically gripping novels of recent years; her latest, Black Water (Faber & Faber), is out in June. Julie Myerson’s The Stopped Heart (Jonathan Cape) is a compelling novel of contemporary horrors and ancient crimes, while Anjali Joseph’s The Living (Fourth Estate) is a moving portrait of two damaged, dignified lives. There’s also I Am No One (Atlantic), the third novel by the gloriously talented Patrick Flanery, and, in September, Connect (Picador), a sci-fi thriller from Julian Gough that caused a serious stir at the London book fair.

Add to all this short story collections from Helen Oyeyemi and Philip Hensher, both of which are supposed to be excellent, and The Good Immigrant, Nikesh Shukla’s anthology of BAME writing produced after the all-white World Book Night fiasco, and you have a 2016 that promises a host of readerly delights. Finally, could this be the year that China Miéville finally gets the critical recognition he deserves? The Census-Taker (Picador, January), is a short, dark fairytale, Kafka rewritten by David Mitchell, and may well be the best thing you’ll read all year.

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