A house of secrets: Where Are the Kings, by Donal Ryan, reviewed
When his mother’s suicide and father’s insanity leave young Jack effectively orphaned, other family members take him in. But will he always be haunted by whispers of scandal and ‘bad blood’?
Into the wild: Country People, by Daniel Mason, reviewed
A Californian family, newly arrived in Vermont, face the harsh realities of the countryside and deeply alarming neighbours
Love and loneliness in the Outer Hebrides: John of John, by Douglas Stuart, reviewed
Summoned home to his dying grandmother in Harris, a gay young man is treated with both violence and tenderness by his father, a Calvinist precentor with a guilty secret
Musical bumps: Discord, by Jeremy Cooper, reviewed
The ebb and flow of harmony between a composer and her chosen solo saxophonist is charted with meticulous precision
Mad, bad and brilliant: Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers, reviewed
The celebrated postwar film actor Klaus Kinski returned to the stage in 1971 to perform a monologue, footage of which has long fascinated the author of this experimental and distinguished novel
A summer romance: Six Weeks by the Sea, by Paula Byrne, reviewed
Byrne imagines the twentysomething Jane Austen, on holiday in Sidmouth, falling for the lawyer Samuel Rose – a perfect foil, being a cross between Mr Darcy and Mr Knightley
A gruesome bohemian upbringing: Days of Light, by Megan Hunter, reviewed
With clear parallels to Angelica Bell at Charleston, young Ivy believes herself a constant disappointment to her family of avant-garde writers and artists
Escape into fantasy: Stories of Ireland, by Brian Friel, reviewed
Friel’s tightly knit rural communities like to cling to illusions, whether it’s belief in sunken gold in the bay or in the continual prosperity of impoverished gentry
A satire on the modern art market: The Violet Hour, by James Cahill, reviewed
A world-renowned painter becomes the ghost of his former self, betraying his instincts to embrace sterile abstraction – and even outsourcing his work to ‘a fabricator in Zurich’
The unfulfilled life: Ask Me Again, by Clare Sestanovich, reviewed
Our aimless young heroine struggles to find herself in New York, Washington and Los Angeles – but even the novel’s inconclusiveness is compelling
A quest for retribution: Fire, by John Boyne, reviewed
Freya, a respected consultant in a burns unit, is on a secret mission to destroy as many young boys’ lives as possible, having been raped by teenagers on holiday in Cornwall at the age of 12
Doctor in trouble: Time of the Child, by Niall Williams, reviewed
In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy…
The tedium of covering ‘the greatest trial in history’
The reporters who descended on Nuremberg in October 1945 included some of the century’s greatest writers. But the protracted proceedings would test their patience – and integrity
After the Flood: There Are Rivers in the Sky, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
Water – essential to life and civilisation, but also a potentially destructive force – is the theme linking three disparate strands in Shafak’s magnificent new novel
In search of kindred spirits: An Absence of Cousins, by Lore Segal, reviewed
When Ilka Weisz, a young refugee from Vienna, accepts a teaching post in smalltown Connecticut, she struggles to make friends in the close-knit academic community
A timely morality tale: The Spoiled Heart, by Sunjeev Sahota, reviewed
Conflicting ideals of old-school socialism and modern identity politics are fought out against a background of urban desolation worthy of Dickens
A voyage of literary discovery: Clara Reads Proust, by Stéphane Carlier, reviewed
A 23-year-old hairdresser casually picks up a copy of Swann’s Way left behind by a client – only to find the novel taking over her life
Victims of a cruel prejudice: the last two men to be executed for sodomy in England
Chris Bryant describes in painful detail how James Pratt and John Smith, working-class men from the Midlands, fell foul of the ‘bloodthirsty English justice system’ in 1835
A redemptive fable: Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips, reviewed
Set in the Appalachian Mountains, the novel centres around a family struggling to survive domestic abuse and abandonment in the aftermath of the American civil war
Escape into the wild: Run to the Western Shore, by Tim Pears, reviewed
A chieftain’s daughter flees an arranged marriage with the Roman governor of Britain, enlisting the help of slave and risking both their lives
Stark realities
Lawyers, teachers, architects and engineers all enjoy sex behind the scenes at a Houston gay bar in a novel focusing on relationships among black urban men
Love in Middle England
A delicate, funny and generous-hearted novel about thwarted love and its aftermath in a 1960s Middle England
Literary charades
Blending fact and fiction, France combines a tale of antics on a creative writing course with episodes from her family life
The curious life of a curate
The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie regales us with stories of mistaken identity, hymns with erotic undertones and an archbishop’s surprising take on Lenten penance
In the fascist grip
A French widower’s horror at his elder son’s involvement with the Front National grows ever deeper as violence escalates
