Communion Town by Sam Thompson (Fourth Estate, £14.99)
From Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities to the New York meanderings of Teju Cole, the urban landscape is fertile territory for reworkings of memory, desire and fear. Thompson's 10 interlinked tales, longlisted for the Man Booker this week, deconstruct genre and myth while remaining original and superbly unsettling. This city constantly shapeshifts  it could be London, LA, Oxford or Barcelona. This mutability  labyrinthine enough for comparisons with Borges  is enhanced by different linguistic styles: here precise, there dreamy, always slightly recondite. In the Chandleresque "Gallathea", a private eye is hired by a femme fatale for an ambiguous missing person case; while Sherlock Holmes is channelled in "The Significant City of Lazarus Glass". Jack the Ripper stalks these streets, as does the Ancient Mariner in the form of the Flâneur, a lost soul whose story, once imparted, removes each witness to a place of psychological horror "outside the days".

A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar by Suzanne Joinson (Bloomsbury, 12.99)
In 1923 bicycle-loving Eva English, ambivalent about God, joins her intensely religious sister Lizzie and friend Millicent on a dangerous journey to convert the Muslims of Kashgar. Within a week they are under house arrest. Eva, planning a travel book in emulation of her hero Richard Burton, is caught up in manic turbulence  a far cry from sedate Southsea. Nearly a century later Frieda, an international charity worker, returns to London from a long spell abroad to find Yemeni refugee Tayeb sleeping in her stairwell. Their affinity is heightened by his status and her rootlessness, plus a volatile owl which Freda inherits, along with several exotic objects and a diary, from a woman whose existence was hitherto unknown. The links seem tenuous, but this is a sprightly, engaging and lovingly written book.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt (Macmillan, £12.99)
Brunt's affecting novel about the impact of Aids on one family tackles a subject still rife with ignorance and prejudice. It's New York in the mid-1980s, and 14-year-old June Elbus's beloved uncle Finn has died from an Aids-related illness. In the weeks leading up to his death he undertook a painting of June and her older sister Greta, which gives the book its title. Gentle, erudite Finn was a renowned but reclusive artist. June mourns their relationship, and her escapes from suburbia to his edgy apartment. Greta is jealous; their parents secretive. After a stranger is seen at Finn's funeral, June receives a letter from a man who turns out to be Finn's partner. So begins a unique, magically rendered friendship, as painful on the trials of adolescence as it is about impending mortality.

The Jump Artist by Austin Ratner (Viking, £12.99)
Photographer Philippe Halsman is most famous for his "jumpology"  recording a celebrity in the midst of jumping  stating that "when you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed towards the act of jumping so the mask falls and the real person appears". Ratner has taken this premise for his debut novel, but it isn't Halsman's collaborations with Dalí and others which preoccupy him. Instead it is Halsman's youth, dominated by a sensational trial, at the age of 22, for the alleged murder of his father during a hiking tour of the Austrian alps in 1928, which was known as Austria's Dreyfus affair. The beleaguered defendant fights against an insular, increasingly anti-Jewish legal system in a dense, acutely rendered piece of fiction, with brilliantly constructed court scenes at its centre and a lifetime of mournful elegy for a lost parent ahead.

 This article was amended on 10 August 2012. The original referred to Eva English's hero Robert, rather than Richard, Burton. This has been corrected.