Fiction
A grandmother’s twisted mind: The Passage of Roses, by Tie Ning, reviewed
An ambitious, controlling matriarch will do anything to curry favour during the Cultural Revolution – even to the extent of deliberately harming her vulnerable young granddaughter
No fairytale: The Children, by Melissa Albert, reviewed
What caused the devastating house fire that killed a bestselling children’s author, leaving her son and daughter – the stars of her books – suddenly orphaned?
Vigilante justice: Pure Men, by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, reviewed
The grotesque posthumous lynching of a homosexual by a frenzied mob prompts Sarr’s protagonist to investigate the shadow world of gay life in Senegal
French letters – Albert Camus’s great epistolary love affair
To read the 15-year correspondence between Camus and the actress Maria Casarès is to experience a vertiginous roller-coaster between transcendent joy and abject suffering
Nothing works: The End of Everything, by John M. Harrison, reviewed
Set in ‘one of the well-known seasonal waterside art towns of Kent’, Harrison’s novel is both a bracing vision of environmental collapse and a post-Brexit cri de coeur
Tuscan escapades: Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
An American archivist, hired to catalogue an elderly baronessa’s antiques, finds himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures in the Italian countryside
The agonies of an abandoned wife: Mrs Dickens, by Emily Howes, reviewed
Charles Dickens is cast as a cruel, coercive controller, accusing the mother of his ten children of idleness and stupidity before discarding her for a younger woman
Jaded and adrift: I Want You to Be Happy, by Jem Calder, reviewed
Two lonely residents of east London, well-matched in their attachment to idle dreams, make an awkward stab at a relationship
Mapping the Emerald Isle: Land, by Maggie O’Farrell, reviewed
‘Maps are acts of colonisation, enemy tools,’ says Tomás, a reluctant cartographer in 19th-century Ireland, where cruel English landowners lord it over soulful, downtrodden locals
Signs of impending doom: The Given World, by Melissa Harrison, reviewed
When the cuckoo is no longer heard and even the last badger shuffles off, the inhabitants of Lower Eodham, a village mentioned in Domesday, sense that change can no longer be resisted
The Battle of Cross Street: High and Low, by Amanda Craig, reviewed
A group of writers in north London find themselves under siege in the local café as race riots erupt in a divided neighbourhood
Portrait of an addict: Keshed, by Stu Hennigan, reviewed
Hennigan’s doomed protagonist Sean surveys the wreckage of his past life as he drinks himself into oblivion
A family affair: Love Lane, by Patrick Gale, reviewed
Banished to the Canadian Prairies, Harry Cane lives on the land alone, except for secret nightly visits from his long-term lover and brother-in-law, Paul
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
The good old bad old days: Prestige Drama, by Seamas O’Reilly, reviewed
Set in 1980s Derry, O’Reilly’s novel vividly captures the rifts and festering resentments within a close-knit community during the Troubles
No one is ordinary: The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed
Writing about the inner lives and struggles of small-town characters, Strout reminds us that we are all battling something, even if we don’t broadcast it
They shoot horses: Boyhood, by David Keenan, reviewed
Two young Glaswegians revenge themselves on the men who assaulted them at a nightclub by murdering one of them and killing their herd of horses
Haunting images: The Shadow of the Object, by Chloe Aridjis, reviewed
With its eerie slides portraying the long dead, a magic lantern becomes a focus for the novel’s understated meditation on mortality
An outpouring of jaunty black comedy
Whether reportage or dashed down diary entries, Xandra Bingley’s vivid stories seem to catch life on the wing as it flashes past at terrifying speed
A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed
Gustav Mahler looks back on the pleasures and pains of the past from the windblown deck of SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic
‘A lost generation’: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, by Deborah Levy, reviewed
Stein coined the phrase to describe the disillusioned writers and artists she mentored – but it is the woman herself who proves most elusive
Motherless friends: Kin, by Tayari Jones, reviewed
In the Jim Crow American south, two girls are left to make their own way in life, one more successfully than the other
Singing of arms and the man: Son of Nobody, by Yann Martel, reviewed
Fragments emerge of an epic poem describing the Trojan War from the viewpoint of an ordinary soldier, in it for the loot
Rebarbative relatives abound: The Palm House, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed
Even Riley’s most exasperating characters seem desperate for a quiet sanctum of their own
Tradecraft secrets: a choice of crime fiction
Spy thrillers from James Wolff and Alex Preston reviewed. Plus: a third Rilke novel from Louise Welsh and a rediscovered classic from Duff Cooper
