From Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo to Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings, Percival Everett’s James and a host of inventive debuts – this year’s highlights in fiction

In a year of surprises – a posthumous fable from Gabriel García Márquez, a superhero collaboration between China Miéville and Keanu Reeves – the biggest news, as ever, was a new Sally Rooney novel. Intermezzo (Faber) landed in September: the story of two brothers mourning their father and negotiating relationships with each other and the women in their lives, it is a heartfelt examination of love, sex and grief. With one strand exploring the neurodiverse younger brother’s perspective, and a conflicted stream-of-consciousness for the older, it opens up a more fertile direction after 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You.

A new novel from Alan Hollinghurst is always an event, and in Our Evenings (Picador) he is at the top of his game, mapping Britain’s changing mores through the prisms of class, race, politics and sex in the memoir of a half-Burmese actor whose scholarship to public school catapults him into the world of privilege. Tender, elegiac and gorgeously attentive to detail, it’s a masterly evocation of the gay experience over the past half century.