The hunt for the next Messi: Godwin, by Joseph O’Neill, reviewed
A video file of an African teenager with legendary ball skills is circulating far from his homeland – wherever that is. How hard can it be to track him down?
A sea of troubles: The Coast Road, by Alan Murrin, reviewed
The sudden return of the liberated Colette Crowley to the Donegal fishing village of Ardglas stirs fear and resentment in the closed community
The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed
‘Don’t try to picture the apocalypse’, advises the novel’s unnamed zombie narrator. ‘Everything looks exactly the way you remembered it.’
Mystery in everyday objects
Household gadgets take on a sense of wonder or menace for Lara Pawson, who sees a porpoise’s dorsal fin in the dial of a toaster and a hand grenade in a pepper mill
Prejudice in Pennsylvania: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, reviewed
Inspired by his own family history, McBride explores the problems faced by a Jewish shopkeeper and her black neighbours in the small town of Chicken Hill in the 1930s
The hell of the antebellum South: Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward, reviewed
Teenage Annis and her enslaved mother endure beatings and rape as they are marched in chains to New Orleans to be sold to the latest brutal plantation owner
A treatise on greed: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff reviewed
The American author turns her attention to colonial injustice in a tale about a servant girl who flees a blighted English settlement in 17th-century Jamestown
The good stepmother
Jean entertains her young stepdaughter Leah with drawings and fairy stories – but the two grow sadly estranged in this haunting novel with its own fairy-tale similarities
Mother trouble: Commitment, by Mona Simpson, reviewed
Simpson writes from personal experience in this moving story of three children’s commitment to their mentally ill mother
Secrets of the couch
When a sex therapist arranges for his clients’ sessions to be secretly recorded, there are life-changing consequences for two women involved
An eye for the absurd
Come for the satire, stay for the one-liners, and take succour from the hope Walter finds in a world where everyone needs an angel from time to time
Strange meeting
When distraught teenage Orla embarks on a secret pilgrimage to her mother’s grave, she meets a ‘mad hairy’ man with miraculous powers
Expelled from paradise
A mixed-race family living in an island paradise off the coast of Maine are made painfully aware that their days are numbered
Women of no importance
From their brothels in lawless 1850s Monterrey, Eliza and Jean set out discover why their fellow workers are going missing
Philosophers in the cradle: Marigold and Rose, by Louise Glück, reviewed
Infant twin girls, in the first year of their lives, muse on everything from the futility of existence to the purpose of memory
Seize the moment: Undercurrent, by Barney Norris, reviewed
Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion…
Dark days in Hollywood: Mercury Pictures Presents, by Anthony Marra, reviewed
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…
A child’s-eye view of the not-so-good life
Since winning the Costa prize for best first novel in 2008 with The Outcast, Sadie Jones has become known for…
Troubles of the past: The Slowworm’s Song, by Andrew Miller, reviewed
Andrew Miller specialises in characters who are lost, often struggling to deal with the burden of failure. They don’t come…
Parallel lives: Violets, by Alex Hyde, reviewed
When Violet wakes up in Birmingham Women’s Hospital at the start of Alex Hyde’s debut novel her first thought is…
A tale of love and grim determination: Zorrie, by Laird Hunt, reviewed
When Zorrie Underwood, the titular character in Laird Hunt’s deeply touching novel about an Indiana farm woman, is pregnant, a…
