Nothing makes me happier than a perfectly pitched comic novel, and this year I chanced upon two. Kate Clanchy’s Meeting the English (Picador, £16.99) introduces a young Scottish Candide into upper-middle-class arty north London, where his goodness and common sense are buffeted by the blinding self-absorption of the other characters. This is social comedy so warming and nutritious, so fresh and elegantly executed, it comes as rather a surprise to learn that this is Clanchy’s first novel. It’s probably not compulsory to live in north London to enjoy it, although I have to admit I have given it as a present to several friends who are inclined to regard Hampstead Heath as the centre of the universe.
Antoine Laurain’s The President’s Hat (Gallic, £8.99) is more whimsical but still an exercise in precise judgement. In the mid-1980s, President Mitterrand eats lunch in a Paris brasserie with a couple of associates and then leaves his hat behind. A man picks it up, puts it on and his luck begins to change for the better. Then he loses it, but someone else picks it up and puts it on, and so on and so forth. It’s a fantasy, but a delightful one, edged with satire, avoiding cutesiness, with a Jeevesian eyebrow raised throughout.