In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their penchant for hunting, have turned up in the forest, violently dead and rotting. Deer prints surround one corpse, beetles swarm another’s face and torso. Foxes escaped from an illegal fur farm need little motive to exact summary justice on their former jailor.

Michael Hughes’ second novel, superimposing the post-96 Troubles on the story of The Iliad, rides a wave of Homeric re-tellings, with Pat Barker and Colm Tóibín having recently published contemporary versions. Just as important, though less remarked upon, is the topicality of the Irish Border region, where Hughes grew up, an area that once more finds its identity and security arrangements contested by politicians, this time through the prism of Brexit.

The bestseller Sapiens (2011, first published in English in 2014) by the hitherto little-known Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari has sold enormously well, and justly so: recommended by Bill Gates no less, it has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon.

It was 80 years ago next month that Neville Chamberlain returned with the good news of peace in our time. The Munich Agreement was greeted as a triumph for the appeasers. The price Britain had to pay was a minor stain on its conscience: the decimation of Czechoslovakia. The country was only 20 years old, but the borders of Bohemia and Moravia had been defined many centuries earlier.

If history repeats itself, better hope that it corrects its mistakes as well. This year’s nominations for the h100 awards in publishing and writing reflect the welcome drive towards diversity and inclusion among Britain’s wordsmiths and the various agencies that give a platform to their work.

Hegel, Kant, David Hume, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Leibniz are all adduced, referred to, and paraphrased, and that’s just for starters. Add Rameau, Schubert, Beethoven, Benjamin Britten and the contemporary composer David Matthews (who is also a friend) into the mix for Professor Sir Roger Scruton’s odd and uncategorisable series of essays on music and – especially – listening to music. Underneath it all is a kind of call to arms about how to listen.

“When you were our age, how did you imagine your life? What did you hope for?” It is a video of a classroom south-east of the Périphérique separating Paris from the working-class suburbs. The students are mostly girls between fifteen and sixteen and they wear make-up, jewellery, low-cut tops – we understand they’re sexy, confident, cool. Several are African, North African, Caribbean.

When Lea is nervous she picks at the skin near the nail of her thumb. When she draws blood the wound repairs instantly because she is a member of the Second Wave endowed with SmartBlood™ and DiamondSkin™. Aside from this tic she is an otherwise apparently perfect lifer in a future New York divided into those who may live up to three hundred and those who can merely hope to attain a hundred at most.

The Fens of East Anglia, and the lonely coasts that skirt them, usually sit well below the horizon of mainstream culture. Yet when England’s flatlands and their maritime margins do find a literary voice – in Graham Swift’s Waterland, say, or WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn – a mountainous achievement can result. If it never quite attains those heights, Stella Tillyard’s assured and entrancing second novel deserves a place of honour on this too-short Fenland shelf.

On new year’s day in 2013, Guy Stagg set out to walk alone from Canterbury to Jerusalem. He planned this journey, which would take ten months, cross 11 countries and cover 5500km, in the wake of severe depression, a suicide attempt and the powerful urge “to leave oneself behind”. Although he trekked from shrine to shrine, monastery to monastery, cathedral to cathedral, along the ancient routes of Christian pilgrimage, Stagg did not at the start – nor at the end – share the faith of the footsore wanderers who had trudged these paths before him.