Some novels divide the critics. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry divided one critic, The Times’s Oliver Moody, who called Perry “a wonderful descriptive writer with a remarkable talent for making the familiar strange”, but also thought that the novel “could hardly be any more exhaustively eldritch had it been written by an English literature academic who spent her doctorate studying the role of the gothic in the novels of Iris Murdoch – which she indeed did”. In Metro, Claire Allfree relished the “intelligent, lushly written gothic yarn”, about a newly widowed amateur naturalist from London, a mythical beast and a will-they-won’t-they love affair. Most critics agreed, and many praised the author’s light touch. “Perry’s Victoriana is the most fresh-feeling I can remember, with none of the awkwardly crammed-in research that can plague the contemporary historical novel,” wrote Charlotte Runcie in the Telegraph, while Anthony Cummins in the Spectator found that the writing had “a gorgeous lilt, and for a novel with a built-in anticlimax (unless you’re a Nessie truther), it sustains tension remarkably well … A plus-ça-change frisson comes from references to war in Afghanistan and a housing crisis in London.” In the Sunday Times, Nick Rennison called it “one of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade” which, “for originality, richness of prose and depth of characterisation is unlikely to be bettered this year”.

A trickier second novel was The Muse by Jessie Burton, whose debut The Miniaturist won a clutch of awards and was sold worldwide. With a dual narrative set in 1960s London and 1930s Spain, The Muse “has not quite the magic and ghostly mischief of The Miniaturist”, according to Laura Freeman in the Spectator, but its story of a missing masterpiece is “more suspenseful”. In the Daily Telegraph, Holly Kyte was more reassuring: “Those who loved The Miniaturist will find here all the cliffhangers, twists and heartstopping revelations they expected, and in two evocative settings: sweaty, stuffy London and the bohemian Spanish finca … as a study of female creativity, it triumphs … Burton’s muse … is clearly in fine fettle.” Neither the Mail on Sunday nor the Sunday Times were wholly convinced, however. “Ultimately the novel feels rather too formulaic – almost like painting by numbers,” wrote Anthony Gardner in the former, while in the latter, Nick Rennison was put off by “a Mills & Boon element”.

The was nothing Mills & Boon about Marina Benjamin’s The Middlepause: On Turning 50, a memoir about coming to terms, or not, with ageing. The veteran critic Valerie Grove was unsympathetic. “Fifty!” she gasped in the Evening Standard. “I can barely recall it. Mine whizzed by in a blur of deadlines … No time for a Middlepause ... barely a note in my diary.” But in the Jewish Chronicle, Anne Sebba was more reflective, admiring the chapter about “a group of women who meet regularly to celebrate being alive since one of their number … succumbed to lung cancer two years shy of 50.” Isabel Berwick in the Financial Times hailed the book as a rallying cry for women. “Benjamin’s writing is witty and self-aware … the most sensible writing on the vexed subject of hormone replacement therapy that I have yet come across,” she cheered. “The Middlepause is an honest and uplifting call for us to fight on, battle-scarred and proud of it.”