Adam Nevill excels at making nightmares real. His previous novels have been out-and-out horror, stories of hauntings and occult phenomena peopled by fully realised, three-dimensional characters. Lost Girl (Pan, £7.99) explores new territory and combines two hellish scenarios: the effects of climate change on society, and every parent’s nightmare of having their child abducted. The year is 2053 and the world’s population is suffering the onslaught of global warming: drought and famine push millions towards Europe; nations teeter on the edge of nuclear conflict; and Britain is rapidly failing, with the haves barricaded in gated communities and the have-nots at the mercy of criminal gangs. Amid the chaos, a four-year-old girl is abducted while playing in her garden, and what follows is the harrowing, relentless quest of her father – he is never named in the novel – who stops at nothing to find her. It’s a painful read: Nevill’s portrayal of the breakdown of civilisation, mirrored by the father’s own spiralling moral crisis, is unflinchingly realistic – though not without hope. The author says he wanted the novel to amend “the status of climate change from the existential to the very real”, and in this Lost Girl succeeds brilliantly.

In the first two books of the multi-award winning Ancillary trilogy, Ann Leckie painstakingly built a galaxy-spanning, wide-screen baroque universe in which vast intelligent starships utilised resuscitated corpses as foot soldiers in interstellar conflict, complex political conflict raged between the stars, and hero Breq – who was once part of a hive-mind starship – pursued her quest to take revenge on the empress of the Radch empire. In Ancillary Mercy (Orbit, £8.99), Breq, a fleet captain stationed at Athoek Station, finds herself confronted by an old enemy and faces the dilemma of whether to stay or escape and leave the station to its fate. It may sound like a thousand other routine shoot-’em-up space operas, but the author invests her future with fascinating inquiries into the nature of gender, individual identity and colonisation, all achieved with humour and an enviable ability to tell a cracking story.

Europe at Midnight (Solaris, £7.99) is the sequel to Dave Hutchinson’s critically acclaimed, Arthur C Clarke award-shortlisted Europe in Autumn, a Kafkaesque espionage story set in a fractured Europe made up of a hundred conflicted statelets. At the end of the first novel, it’s revealed that there exists within Europe a secret, shadowy state. Hutchinson’s sequel shuttles between this veiled world and a near-future sovereign England conducting a perpetual war on terror. In London, intelligence officer Jim is investigating a mysterious stabbing at a bus stop, which leads him into a labyrinth of intrigue and deception, while in the pocket universe of “The Campus”, security officer Rupert works on a case involving bodies discovered in a river. With seemingly effortless literary flair, Hutchinson reveals how the stories intersect in a complex, unsettling allegory of political manoeuvring, subterfuge and statecraft.

In the Gideon Smith trilogy, David Barnett has crafted not only a thoroughly likable hero in the eponymous Smith – hero of the Empire – but an engaging entourage of co-conspirators in Maria the mechanical girl, airship pilot Rowena Fanshawe, and alcoholic journalist Aloysius Bent. Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (Snow, £8.99) sees our heroes tearing around a Victorian London replete with pea soupers, voracious tyrannosaurs and artificial brains. Smith finds himself bereft of his memory after it is removed by an old adversary, and faces death at every turn while on the trail of Jack the Ripper. It’s glorious, tongue-in-cheek fun, with cliffhangers aplenty, derring-do, dastardly villains and every trope of the steampunk subgenre used to glorious effect.

William Gay published three southern gothic horror novels and a collection of stories in his lifetime. Little Sister Death (Faber, £12.99) was discovered among his papers after his death in 2012. The short, lyrical novel is a reworking of the 1804 Bell Witch haunting in Tennessee, when farmer John Bell and his family moved to a house built on an ancient Indian burial ground and found themselves persecuted by evil spirits. Gay updates the story, with blocked writer David Binder moving to Tennessee and leasing Beale House in order to work on a horror novel. Binder soon becomes fascinated with the curse of the Bell Witch, and suffers the consequences as he and his family fall victim to Beale House’s creeping malignancy. Despite its abrupt finale, Little Sister Death is a chilling meditation on the craft of writing and writerly obsession.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is Jani and the Greater Game (Solaris).