The Spider King's Daughter by Chibundu Onuzo (Faber, £12.99)
Two teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks are the central players in a fiery Nigerian revenge tragedy. In present-day Lagos, Abike, precocious daughter of an oligarch, encounters a street hawker selling ice-cream as she is chauffeured around the city. Runner G is set apart from the other hawkers by his tenacity and class. He lives in the notorious Mile 12 district, where rubbish heaps resemble "burial mounds". Sole supporter of a sister and widowed mother, he once attended private school like Abike until his lawyer father was mysteriously killed. Their attraction is palpable, but Abike plays the same haughty games with "my hawker" as she does with her sadistic father, whose enormous wealth derives from mass corruption and exploitation. Although there is some clumsy execution, as Runner G digs deeper, the results are explosive.
The House on Paradise Street by Sofka Zinovieff (Short Books, £12.99)
Zinovieff's intense, multi-generational story covers 70 years of Greek history. When charismatic journalist Nikitas Perifanis dies suddenly, his third wife, English Maud, is bewildered by the circumstances. The answer lies in the complex relationships and conflicted alliances within the high-ranking Perifanis family, stretching back to the German occupation of the second world war and subsequent civil war. Nikitas had been born in prison to Antigone, rebel and partisan fighter. When she defected to Russia, Nikitas was raised by his aunt and her brutal husband, an alleged collaborator. Now the participants are old or deceased, but with Antigone's return to Athens for the first time in more than 50 years, the revolutionary baton passes to Nikitas's children, as Greece suffers again in violent protest and fiscal meltdown. Despite too many threads, this is a fiercely absorbing, passionate book.
The Death of Bees by Lisa O'Donnell (Heinemann, £12.99)
"Today I'm 15. Today I buried my parents in the backyard. Neither of them were beloved." The shocking opening sets the tone for a black comedy, mixing The Ladykillers with Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. It's relayed in matter-of-fact prose by foul-mouthed yet vulnerable Marnie and her younger sister Nelly, a slightly autistic violin-playing prodigy who hides behind genteel, otherworldly language. The girls' unusual horticultural pursuits (planting lavender out of season to obscure the shallow graves) have been observed by Lennie, a lonely elderly neighbour on their Glasgow estate; he proves an unexpected ally. As they try to preserve the secret of the parents' disappearance and keep the sisters out of foster care, the trio is pursued by social services, drug dealers and a sinister, long-lost grandfather. O'Donnell adeptly balances caustic humour and compassion, although the threat of ecological disaster is a convoluted aside.
Disappearing Home by Deborah Morgan (Tindal Street, £12.99)
Like many first novels, Morgan's is overtly, and in this case unenviably, autobiographical. Robyn is 10 and already an accomplished shoplifter for her mum and dad, with whom she lives in a Liverpool tenement. It's the 1970s: strikes, power cuts and a proliferation of Timpson shoe shops. Humiliated at home and at school, Robyn remains cheeky and resourceful. Her beloved nan assures her that "better times will come", but meanwhile we witness page after page of domestic violence, where even in good weather "the sun isn't a warm sun". What lifts this above misery fiction is the strength of Morgan's writing believable characterisation, an ear for dialogue and memorable imagery.
