Summerwater
by Sarah Moss (Picador, £14.99)
In a time of unrest and pandemic novelists are, if a slew of recent articles are to be believed, either gleefully priming their keyboards, cursing at finding themselves too deep into their current manuscript to change direction-or simply despairing. Who will write the definitive work for these “unprecedented times”? One that looks to the past while reconfiguring the future? (Ali Smith’s effort is reviewed on p67.) The consensus is that a hot take from Ian McEwan will hit the shops in 2021. Saturday (2005), in which McEwan placed one comfortably-off London family at the heart of the protest against the Iraq war in spring 2003, was lauded as a definitive state-of-the-nation novel. Like it or loathe it, the novel still resonates 15 years later.