Despite a tough shortlist that set it against the likes of Jilly Cooper and Kate Mosse, Rebecca F Kuang’s bestselling novel Yellowface scooped the prize for fiction book of the year.

When failed writer June Hayward witnesses her rival Athena Liu die in a freak accident, she sees her opportunity… and takes it. So what if it means stealing Athena’s final manuscript? So what if it means ‘borrowing’ her identity? And so what if the first lie is only the beginning…

The pageturner of the year award, supported by Stylist, went to Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. Having sold nearly 200,000 copies in hard­back alone, the adult fantasy novel was hailed a “groundbreaking” book by one judge.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general – Violet’s tough-as-talons mother – has ordered her to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

Everyone at Basgiath has an agenda, and every night could be your last. So, sleep with one eye open because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.

Alice Winn was declared the “undeniable” winner of this year’s prize with her “stunning” debut novel In Memoriam, a love story about two young men who leave their public school to fight in the first world war.

It’s 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At 17, they’re too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle – an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood – not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him and always has been. When Gaunt’s German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood.

The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, spurred on by his love of Greek heroes and romantic poetry. Before long, their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, but their friends are all dying, right in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.

Audiobook fiction book of the year went to None Of This is True by Lisa Jewell, narrated by The Split’s Nicola Walker and Such Brave Girls’s Louise Brealey.

Celebrating her 45th birthday at her local pub, podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair, who is also celebrating her 45th. A few days later, they bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie says she thinks she would be an interesting subject for Alix’s podcast. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

Alix agrees to a trial interview and Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated. Alix finds her unsettling but can’t quite resist the temptation to keep digging. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it Josie has cajoled her way into Alix’s life – and into her home. Soon Alix begins to wonder who Josie Fair really is. And what has she done?