Twenty years after she first appeared in novel form, Bridget Jones is still causing a Marmite reaction among critics. Helen Fielding’s fourth novel in the franchise, Bridget Jones’s Baby, confused some by appearing shortly after the film of the same name, but with a slightly different plot, and three years after the third novel, but set before that one. For most it came as a pleasant surprise: “I was expecting a lame retread of the film but I couldn’t have been more wrong, I realised, as I turned the pages, crying with laughter,” wrote Katie Law in the Evening Standard. “Bridget Jones is as relevant and funny today as she has always been.” The plot once again pits Bridget’s lovers Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy against each other, this time over the paternity of Bridget’s unborn child, with Cleaver getting all the best lines, according to Law. Molly Young in the New York Times was unimpressed: “Comparing [Bridget] with the great diarists of fiction – Humbert Humbert, Cassandra Mortmain – is like comparing an Oreo to a gâteau de mille-feuilles,” she wrote. But Isabel Berwick in the Financial Times admired “the usual funny and poignant mishaps” and declared the whole thing “VG”.

Many reviewers were in two minds about Ali Smith’s Autumn, a novel set in a post-Brexit Britain and involving a young woman, an old man and the 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty. The Daily Mail’s Claire Allfree enjoyed the “playful use of language”, but decided: “Ali Smith is a terrific writer, but this latest novel is not quite brilliant … the narrative itself plays havoc with time, telescoping back and forth across the decades in ways that underscore the impossibility of ever charting a coherent line through history, but which also prevent the novel’s many narrative strands from coming fully into focus.” The Sunday Express’s Charlotte Heathcote also called “the litheness of her language ... a joy”, but found the novel “light on plot, being more of a series of thoughts, word play and musings on the meaning of life. It is beautifully done.” In the Sunday Times, Lucy Atkins summarised: “If you favour a nice, safe linear plot, Ali Smith is not the author for you. Her books are experimental, thematically complex, associative, time-juggling, powered by a crazed and energetic curiosity … Like the superb How to Be Both … it is an adventure in associative thinking.”

SAS: Rogue Heroes – The Authorized Wartime History, by Ben Macintyre, seemed to be one for the blokes. The Daily Telegraph’s Sinclair McKay called it a “compelling” tale, “full of jeopardy”, compiled using “unprecedented access to SAS regimental archives and diaries”. As with his previous books, McKay surmised, “Macintyre has no problem delivering a colourful narrative rich in moral ambiguities.” The Times’s Lawrence James agreed, writing that “Ben Macintyre’s coverage of the SAS in north Africa and, later, Italy, France and Germany, is brilliant, blending gripping narratives of fighting with descriptions of the fears of individual soldiers before battle and their reactions to its horror.” For Allan Massie in the Scotsman, it was Macintyre’s “grippingly readable” humanising of the SAS that most appealed. “Macintyre tells the extraordinary story of the SAS compellingly. He gives us the glory but does not shrink from the horrors, and we mere civilians can only wonder at the bravery of the men he describes so vividly, and at what they endured and achieved.”