Geoff Dyer, author

I finally got round to Thoreau’s Journal. It is determinedly down-to-earth and soaring, lyrical and belligerent, humane and cantankerous. Walt Whitman thought Thoreau suffered from “a very aggravated case of superciliousness”, but as Walt also said (of himself) the Journal of this brooding, solitary figure is great; it “contains multitudes.”

I’ve also been reading Xiaolou Guo’s My Battle of Hastings. Having moved to Britain and switched to writing in English, the Chinese writer and film-maker makes an impulsive decision to buy a flat by the sea in Hastings. Very funny, as she always is, but also a serious look at Britain and Brexit. It might even be a study of how the historical roots of that decision extend back to 1066.

And Meghan Daum’s The Catastrophe Hour: all credit to UK-based Notting Hill Editions for publishing this latest instalment of pieces by one of American’s finest, wittiest and most scathing essayists.

• Homework by Geoff Dyer is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Sarah, Guardian reader

I absolutely devoured Lily King’s new novel Heart the Lover. It’s a classic girl-meets-boy love story but feels totally fresh and the story is told in an engrossing way. It is smart, romantic and literary – three things that are hard to do well at the same time, but King totally succeeds and this is up there with my top reads of the year.

My enjoyment of Heart the Lover sent me off in search of more literary campus-set coming of age novels in which romance is central to the plot, so I also read (and loved) My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin, a story centred on an affair between a final-year student and a married professor at a New England college in the late 90s.

My final recommendation from this genre is The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. I’m still reading this one but it’s excellent: clever, deftly drawn characters and witty dialogue. I’m convinced Eugenides can do no wrong, as his novel Middlesex is one of my all-time favourites as well.

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Marcia Hutchinson, author

Act Normal is not so much a memoir as the butterfly musings of the genius Peter Kalu. Chronology be damned, Peter writes as if possessed by the ghosts of his past. The reader will encounter an almost Dickensian roll call of characters for whom the word “eccentric” barely scratches the surface.

The Best of Everything is Kit de Waal’s exquisite third novel about found rather than inherited family. I practically queued up to buy this one on publication day as I adored her debut, My Name Is Leon. In The Best of Everything, love comes from an unexpected direction for middle-aged hospital worker Paulette: an unsung hero and the kind of stolid Windrush woman who has been all but forgotten.

Jamaica Road is a wonderful debut novel by Lisa Smith. Daphne, the only Black girl in her class in south London is content enough trying to blend in when new classmate Connie Small arrives “fresh off the boat” from Jamaica. His refusal to bow to the ascendancy of the white kids awakens something in her and eventually upends both their lives. The racism of the 1980s and in particular the Deptford fire form a poignant backdrop which is only too familiar now.

It’s a long time since I finished a book in one sitting, but Kate Griffin’s dark and twisted gothic tale Fyneshade, about a governess gone bad, really got to me. A gripping page-turner, ideal for cold winter evenings.

• The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson is published by Cassava Republic. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Jim, Guardian reader

I’ve been reading The Art of Losing by Alice Zeniter. A young woman of Algerian descent tries to piece together the history of her family. As she conjures up the memory of her grandfather Ali and her father Hamid, she traces the outbreak of the Algerian war of independence.

It is a story told simply and elegantly and with great humanity, as it unpicks the struggles and the compromises that people have to make in order to survive. At the same time it is unsparing in its critique of colonialism and racism. The writing is hypnotic and I find myself rationing the chapters to prolong the pleasure.

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I have noticed that many of the books I have loved have a recurring theme: how to survive in a changing world and find your own place simply to be. Maybe it’s something to do with my own background as a gay man, originally from Northern Ireland, who grew up at the height of the Troubles.

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Andrew Michael Hurley, author

Ideal for winter evenings is After Midnight, a new Virago anthology of Daphne du Maurier’s short fiction. Another “after hours” book I’ve enjoyed recently is Bora Chung’s Midnight Timetable: a novel formed of various stories connected with the strange and sinister Institute – a maze-like place in which cursed objects are kept for research. South Korean folklore, urban horror stories and surrealism are fused into something truly nightmarish.

An older novel that I often return to is John McGahern’s The Leavetaking, in which a Catholic schoolteacher reflects on his life after being sacked for marrying a divorcee. Here, the past is half-remembered, half-imagined – as the past always is – and McGahern’s exquisite sentences capture every nuance of elegy, regret, yearning and hope.

And finally, Helm, by Sarah Hall, tells the story of our relationship with the elements and the elementals. Narrated by the titular Pennine wind, the novel moves along humanity’s timeline, documenting all our wonder, creativity, ignorance and folly. It’s a joy to read something so profound and playful. In every line, there is a new insight or a wonderful surprise.

• Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

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Tim, Guardian reader

This month I read three very different books that somehow spoke to each other: Lost Horizon by James Hilton, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and Feeding the Machine by James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant.

Lost Horizon is getting on for a century old yet it feels startlingly fresh – a perfectly paced novel that balances adventure and quiet philosophy. Hilton’s prose is lean but luminous, and his idea of Shangri-La still feels like a metaphor for the human wish to withdraw from chaos without fully escaping it.

Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 offered the opposite experience: a dizzying, paranoid web of symbols and coincidences that mirrors our own algorithmic age. It’s absurd, funny, and somehow comforting in its refusal to make sense.

And Feeding the Machine grounded both worlds – a sharp, lucid analysis of how digital labour and AI infrastructures shape our daily lives. Reading it after Hilton and Pynchon felt like closing the loop between the dream of utopia, the breakdown of meaning, and the real machinery behind both.

Living is hard emotional work – until you try dying. Alongside the rage many terminally ill people feel against the dying of the light, there are the memories that return to flagellate the conscience: the failures of kindness, the misjudged words that can’t be unsaid, the feelings left catastrophically unexpressed. Crimes of the heart – and sometimes, worse.

The malaise of regret and the yearning for absolution vibrate through Andrew Michael Hurley’s latest work of fiction, a wildly atmospheric, deceptively simple tale that borrows tropes from cosy crime only to snare you into something deeper, darker and more chilling.

The driving animus of Hurley’s fiction has always been place. In his bestselling debut, The Loney, set in Morecambe Bay, and the folk-horror works that followed – Barrowbeck, Devil’s Day and Starve Acre – he evokes the atmosphere and folklore of his settings with deft, idiosyncratic brushstrokes that bring the reader into territory as psychic, even mythic, as it is physical. In Saltwash, the titular town of his new novel is a semi-abandoned coastal resort whose estuary has become “suckled down to a delta of dark streams and vast sandbanks”, and on whose tattered streets “the neglect … was so rife as to seem wilful”. Saltwash is not so much a town as a state of mind: one that the novel’s septuagenarian protagonist, Tom Shift, will be forced to reckon with during the course of his brief but soul-shaking visit.

He arrives in the pounding rain for a meeting proposed by Oliver, the mercurial, enigmatic penpal brokered for him by the clinic where he goes for therapy. But Tom is drawn to their rendezvous at the crumbling Castle Hotel as much by curiosity as by friendship. Why do Oliver’s letters, though larded with literary allusions to mortality, shy away from the intended subject of their correspondence – which is that both of them are dying?

While the doomed Tom waits for the doomed Oliver in the hotel bar – all mildewed walls, surly staff and peeling stucco – more elderly people appear, as if for a reunion. Maniacally talkative, and dressed in the finery of their younger incarnations, they are cartoonishly drawn yet ghoulishly credible, and as the booze flows it emerges that they, too, are waiting for Oliver, and this is an annual party, the high point of which is to be a lottery.

When Oliver finally appears, he immediately takes over the show, scattering bons mots and performing magic tricks with a verve and panache at odds with his unwashed clothes and skeletal appearance. As the night wears on, Tom catches dark hints about some of the other guests, but remains an innocent if increasingly anxious bystander to their simmering conflicts and intrigues. Yet as the meal is served – starting with an eel, celery and tomato soup so vile that one of the party vomits – his feeling that “he needed to be that rare thing, a better person” begins to build to a pitch he can’t ignore. Something is horribly awry here. Why is Tom, the only newcomer to the annual gathering, forbidden to know more about the lottery? And why is everyone so desperate to win?

Easy to read but challenging to process, the novel left me entertained, but also feeling as raw, unsettled and existentially shaken as Tom, its hapless everyman. And perhaps that is exactly the intention. While Saltwash may not be the ideal Christmas gift for anyone confronting their mortality, for some unexamined souls it may be perfect. Welcoming on the outside, and increasingly unnerving as you reach the core of its gruesome, shocking proposition, Hurley’s latest offering is Heart of Darkness wrapped in candy.

Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley is published by John Murray (£16.99. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.