From troubled Irish families and shocking French showmen to a court case in Victorian Britain, these are BBC Culture's picks of the best fiction of the year so far.
In her first historical novel, Zadie Smith examines 19th-Century colonialism, with several interwoven plots that take place over half a century. At the centre of the story is a real-life trial of a man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, thought to have died at sea, and heir to a huge fortune. The trial is seen through the eyes of Eliza Touchet, with interludes depicting the life of Andrew Bogle, an older formerly enslaved man who is acting as a witness in the trial.
An anonymous postcard leads to a journey of discovery in Anne Berest's The Postcard, the tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust, as well as a portrait of 20th-Century Parisian artistic and intellectual life.
In the Survivalists, Aretha, a lawyer, moves in with her coffee-entrepreneur boyfriend, Aaron, and his doomsday-prepping housemates. What follows is a half-joking exploration of capitalism, gun ownership, and what it takes to survive in the modern world as a black American.
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