Dazzling debut fiction: Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy, Boy from the North Country by Sam Sussman, Our Precious Wars by Perrine Tripier

I adored this captivating coming-of-age novel about friendship and femininity. Set in New York, it centres on the relationship between best friends Avery and Frances.

From a wealthy family, Frances is making an experimental documentary about rural isolation and right-wing conspiracy theories.

Avery grew up in a dysfunctional home and mostly trails around after Frances, who drops out of grad school, leaves the city and gets ­married, yet still finishes her documentary and returns as the toast of the art world.

Avery, meanwhile, is an emotional and financial mess. The narrative moves forwards in sharp fragments that pierce with their ­intensity. It’s cool, clever and current. I predict a smash hit.

Twenty-six-year-old Ewan’s fun urban existence is upended when he is told that his clean-living mother has aggressive cancer and that he needs to get home to upstate New York from ­London as soon as possible.

As Ewan’s only parent begins chemotherapy, she starts to share the stories of her early life, when she lived in New York and met Ewan’s previously ­undiscussed father.

Ewan has always been a fan of Bob Dylan and told he is a dead ringer for the musician. Although Dylan is never explicitly named as Ewan’s father, the implication is clear.

Inspired by the author’s own uncertain [Dylan maybe his father] paternity, it is most brilliant on the ­mother-son relationship and the anticipation of her loss.

It’s vulnerable, intimate, and simultaneously heart­warming and heart-wrenching. I raced through it.

Translated from its original French by Alison Anderson, this beguiling novel won its 25-five-year-old author a big literary prize when first published in France in 2023. Narrated by Isadora, an elderly woman living in a hospice, the story is split into four sections that represent the different seasons.

Isadora has only been in the hospice for a few months – before this she spent her entire life in the large ­country home, built by her great-great-grandfather, that she misses deeply.

Isadora spends the little time she has left conjuring up memories of her home and its rural surroundings. Tripier writes beautifully about how much the natural world and home can mean.