And yet Emily St John Mandel’s fourth novel is different partly because she skips over the apocalypse itself - all the action takes place just before or 20 years afterwards - and because it is less about the survival of the human race than the survival of Shakespeare. Station Eleven (Picador/ Vintage) is an apocalyptic novel about a world in which almost everyone has died in a flu pandemic, and clans roam the earth killing at random. There is more optimism here than the situation warrants, but a dose of hopefulness is perhaps a necessary ingredient in a work that is intended as a call to the barricades. Suffice it to say that Klein demolishes every argument for “market-based solutions”, exposes the carbon complicities of “Big Green” organisations, demonstrates why geoengineering will not work, and after all that even succeeds in finding a silver lining in the clouds. Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (Allen Lane/Simon & Schuster) is a work of such monumental significance that it is impossible to do justice to it in a few lines. Characteristically perceptive and poignant, like its predecessor it also gives a vivid and often thrilling account of life during the second world war - seen this time from the air rather than the streets of London. Elegantly structured and beautifully told, it recounts the story of Teddy Todd, the brother of the protagonist of Atkinson’s 2013 novel, Life After Life, in his attempt to live a “good, quiet life” in the 20th century.

Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins (Doubleday/Little, Brown) is nothing short of a masterpiece. It has a chilly beauty, and hasn’t quite left my head since I read it six months ago. It’s a strange, oblique, devastated novel that inhabits the landscape after a big break-up without giving up any details. In fact, it’s rather cosy and seductive in the way eavesdropping in a café can be: you think you shouldn’t keep listening, but you do. It’s undoubtedly experimental in terms of concept and delivery, but there’s nothing that’s intimidating in the manner of some experimental works.

Rachel Cusk’s Outline (Faber/Farrar, Straus & Giroux) falls into neither camp. Most “experimental” novels fall into one of two categories: those that experiment with language, and those that experiment with representations of reality.

How Dear the Dawn by Marc Eliot