Fiction review of the year

The Trial

by Rob Rinder,

Century Books, £20

​Rob Rinder’s multi-faceted career — from criminal lawyer to popular entertainer (including stints as a Strictly dancer and a panto dame), to TV presenter (including serious contributions to Holocaust programmes) — finds new expression in this wickedly comic tale of a nerdy barrister and a murder on an open pavement outside the Old Bailey, of all places. Rinder’s hero, Adam Green, “definitely not my alter ego”, has a somewhat clownish Jewish mother, but The Trial is a great holiday page-turner. Jenni Frazer

My Father’s House

by Joseph O’Connor

Harvill Secker, £20

​This novel is based on the extraordinary true story of a Catholic priest, Hugh O’Flaherty, in Rome in 1943, and the running battle of wits he and a team of unlikely conspirators played against the terrifying Nazi leader, Paul Hauptmann (in real life known as Herbert Kappler) in charge of security in Rome. It’s both beautifully written literature and a cracking will-they-won’t-they thriller, as team O’Flaherty embark on a race against time, counting down to Christmas Eve and the next dangerous mission to save Allied soldiers. Gorgeous and brilliant. Jenni Frazer

The Wolf Hunt

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Pushkin Press,£16.99

​Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s most recent novel steps outside the occasionally claustrophobic Israel bubble of her previous offerings to present us with a fascinating portrait of fish-out- of-water Israelis in America.

Her fictional family, the Shusters, are trying hard to fit in, but when teenage son Adam is believed to have murdered his schoolmate, Jamal, everything falls apart.

Lilach Shuster, the narrator, is about as unreliable a witness as is possible. Fiercely enjoyable. Jenni Frazer

Eternal

by Lisa Scottoline

Bedford Square, £9.99

​The prolific Lisa Scottoline tends to write hard-boiled thrillers about feisty women lawyers in Philadelphia.

But with Eternal, she shifts both time and location to take the reader back to wartime Rome — and to show us how both Jews and Romans alike reacted to the Italian race laws.

This being Scottoline, we get a full measure of deep research and a slightly gloopy love story mixed in, but it’s certainly well worth a read. Jenni Frazer

An Ordinary Youth

by Walter Lempowski

Granta, £18.99

​Michael Lipkin’s translation of Walter Lempowski’s autobiographical novel about his formative years as a child and teenager in Nazi Germany is long overdue. Lempowski’s implacable fury about the complicity of middle-class Germans flows through the book like magma, and yet the people he describes are recognisable, rounded characters, by no means entirely unsympathetic. You may despise them, but Lempowski forces us to ask how different we would be in such a situation. Alun David

Before All the World

by Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Corsair, £18.99

​Written in a unique mix of Yiddish and English avowedly inspired by James Joyce, Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s novel is extraordinarily ambitious and yet remarkably satisfying. Two survivors of pogroms in Ukraine during the Russian civil war start their lives again in post-prohibition America. By turns erotic, tragic, and lyrical, the book draws on the high modernist tradition to offer a moving Jewish story for 21st-century progressive sensibilities. Alun David

A Silence Shared

by Lalla Romano

Pushkin Press, £10.99

​Italian author, translator, artist and activist Lalla Romano spent much of Italy’s German Occupation in hiding. In A Silence Shared she recorded and fictionalised her rural seclusion with fellow partisans in the Partito d’Azione. More than 2,000 of the 35,000 Jews in the Occupied Zone joined the Resistance, including her fellow author Primo Levi. A Silence Shared, however, tells a story less of insurgency than isolation. She relates the intensity of clandestine intimacies and constant dangers with moving lyricism and sensitivity. Amanda Hopkinson