It’s New Year’s Eve 1982 and Oona Lockhart, who turns 19 tomorrow, faces a dilemma: to remain in New York with her musician boyfriend, or to leave him for university in London. A day later, the choice has been made for her. Oona is no longer 18, and it’s no longer the 1980s. She awakes in the body of her 51-year-old self, and the year is 2015. So begins Margarita Montimore’s thought-provoking The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart (Gollancz, £14.99). The novel follows Oona over the course of eight disordered years as, on each New Year’s Day, she finds herself inhabiting her own body at a different age: one year she is 51, the next 27, then 40 … It’s a non-sequential journey of self-discovery in which she must come to terms, both psychologically and practically, with her unique predicament. Knowledge of the future allows her to amass material wealth, but does awareness of her mistakes allow her to avoid making them once again? By turns tragic and triumphant, heartbreakingly poignant and joyful, this is ultimately an uplifting and redemptive read.

Five years after The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, a headlong steampunk adventure set in an alternate Victorian London and featuring a cast of unusual and well-drawn characters, Natasha Pulley is back with a sequel, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow (Bloomsbury, £12.99). Her debut introduced us to Keita Mori, a Japanese watchmaker with a peculiar ability to discern possible futures, and his friend the civil servant and translator Thaniel Steepleton. The second volume takes us to Japan in 1888, where staff at the British legation are terrified by ghostly goings on in the building. Thaniel is tasked with travelling to Tokyo to look into the matter, and soon finds himself in a tangle of intrigue involving a supernatural samurai warrior, the threat of Russian invasion and the disappearance of Mr Mori. Pulley combines H Rider Haggard-style historical adventure with bizarre fantasy, but also excels at portraying the emotionally charged interplay of her charming cast.

In By Force Alone (Head of Zeus, £18.99) by Lavie Tidhar, the Romans have left Britain, and murderous tribes vie for control of this “shithole”. Tidhar charts King Arthur’s birth, his rise to power and his death, portraying the young Arthur as a power-hungry opportunist engaged in protection rackets and drug-running, his ascendency achieved with the magical assistance of a Machiavellian, shape-changing Merlin. The novel is a bloody, bravura performance, which Tidhar pulls off with graphic imagery and modern vernacular – let down by some clunking prose and much sentence splicing. By Force Alone is Tidhar’s scatological contribution to the field of Arthurian romance, a salutary antidote to the more romantic glossings of recent modern fantasy.

Max Barry is known for his near-future social satires, but now the Australian author has turned his hand to science fiction. Providence (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) is a fast-paced, intelligent military space opera focusing on the crew of a starship involved in an interstellar war against implacable six-legged aliens known as the Salamanders, who have a unique method of attack: they vomit, or “huk”, material that shreds matter. So far, so generic, but Barry brings his skills of characterisation and satire to the fore in his depiction of the starship’s four crew members and their perilous journey into the heart of the Salamanders’ empire. Barry delivers some stunning action sequences and provides a bittersweet resolution.

After more than a dozen bestselling epic fantasy novels aimed at the young adult market, Sarah J Maas’s adult debut is the meaty House of Earth and Blood (Bloomsbury, £16.99), a vast tome totalling almost 800 pages, filleted into 97 easily digestible chapters. Crescent City is a futuristic metropolis with a social structure based on that of the Roman empire. Magic rubs along with technology and the elite possess occult powers; witches, shapeshifters, werewolves and vampires rule over a subclass of humans. When the brutal murder of a pack of wolf shapeshifters is followed by others just as grisly, Bryce Quinlan, a fae‑human hybrid, is asked by the city’s rulers to investigate, assisted by hunky love interest Hunt Athalar, a slave assassin. The predictable slow-burning romance follows, spiced with some slick plotting and atmospheric world-building. Older teenagers thrilled by Maas’s Throne of Glass series will find the first volume of the Crescent City series a page-turning delight.

• Eric Brown’s latest novel is The Martian Menace (Titan).