Evicted, a study of America’s poor by the Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond, was hailed on both sides of the Atlantic as a timely and important book. In the Sunday Times, Ed Caesar praised it as “a monumental and vivid study of urban poverty in America”, though it had lost some urgency as Desmond’s fieldwork was done in 2008-09. For Jason DeParle of the New York Review of Books, Desmond is “one of a rare academic breed: a poverty expert who engages with the poor”. In the New York Times, Jennifer Senior described the book as a “regal hybrid of ethnography and policy reporting … an exhaustively researched, vividly realised and, above all, unignorable book – after Evicted it will no longer be possible to have a serious discussion about poverty without having a serious discussion about housing.” For Danny Dorling, writing in the Observer, the major lesson of the book was stark: “America shows us where Britain is heading.”

The Bricks That Built the Houses, the debut novel by the poet and rapper Kate Tempest, proved to be literary Marmite: the critics who hated it really hated it. For Fiona Wilson of the Times, “This is a novel of discontentment, rage and good intentions that is let down by cardboard cut-out caricatures and uneven storytelling … If this book is a wake-up call, then I overslept.” In the Independent, Suzy Feay was even more negtive. “You can be moved by her insistence that everyone has an interesting backstory, while being irritated by the tedium of being told about it,” she wrote. Tempest’s “authorial sympathy is strictly rationed” and “the writing is a strain”: all in all, “this makes White Teeth look like Middlemarch.” For Francesca Angelini, writing in the Sunday Times, the book was “surprisingly conventional”. Tempest is a “worthy champion for a generation of disillusioned youth, but her passion overwhelms her writing, precluding nuance and depth.” It was left to Andrew MacMillan in the Independent to flag up some of the positives. “This is an ambitious novel with a relentless thrust … Thepace is often breathless but that, perhaps, just reflects the culture of youth and the culture of our capital city.”

Irvine Welsh fared little better with his latest offering The Blade Artist, a sequel to Trainspotting. In the Sunday Times, Claire Lowdon accused him of downright cynicism: “What is so insulting about the Blade Artist is that Welsh seems to think that the fans want nothing besides the expected bloody climax: no plausible characterisation, no decent writing, not even a bit of tension to keep you going until shlock o’clock … The Blade Artist will probably make Welsh a lot of money. But as far as his reputation goes, the Trainspotting account is dangerously overdrawn.” But Orlando Bird, writing in the Daily Telegraph, was more forgiving. While he agreed that “this isn’t his new masterpiece nor is it the ever-promised ‘return to form’”, he found much to enjoy. “The Blade Artist is lean, clever and propulsive … Whatever might be said about Welsh’s creative development, there is a reason people still read him.” In the Times, Kate Muir also found it “compelling, and Welsh keeps the plot roaring along … in many ways this book could have been longer, deeper and more polished. Yet for the Trainspotting generation this is a dark, guilty pleasure and written with – it seems to me – the cinema screen in mind.”