Crusaders
By Richard T. Kelly
Faber £14.99, 556 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.51

Is Richard T. Kelly’s Crusaders the finest fiction debut of 2008? Too early to say, but there’s little doubt that this epic will feature prominently in next Christmas’s “books of the year” round-ups. Like the new Eurostar Terminus at St Pancras, this extraordinary state-of-the-nation novel manages to seem utterly of its time, despite the magnificent and unfashionable Victorian structural engineering that underpins it.