Gregory’s extraordinarily original, affecting and urgent new novel The Devil’s Highway is set on and around the true highway – a Roman road that crosses north Surrey and Hampshire which Gregory researched and explored on foot. It’s a vivid and expertly constructed novel spanning three thousand years and charting the ways in which one place can become many places over time.

Tony White’s brilliant The Fountain in the Forest shifts between Holborn Police Station, an abandoned village in rural 1980s France, and Stonehenge’s Battle of the Beanfield. Transforming the traditional crime narrative into something dizzyingly unique it is at once an avant-garde linguistic experiment, thrilling police procedural and philosophical meditation on liberty. A counter-culture bildungsroman, this is an iconoclastic novel of unparalleled ambition.

If you like your fiction a little more inventive, then this night will be right up your trouser leg.