The Innocents by Francesca Segal (Chatto, £12.99)
Edith Wharton's classic of thwarted, repressed love, The Age of Innocence, is updated in Segal's stylish, thoughtful debut. Old New York is swapped for contemporary Jewish north London. Adam and Rachel have been together since they were teenagers. He is a lawyer in her father's firm, and has slipped into the ease and cosiness of the fold. And yet Adam finds the comforting conventions and rituals stifling. Diversion arrives from New York in the form of Ellie, Rachel's younger cousin  her sexy unkemptness and tough vulnerability an enthralling contrast to Rachel's prissy, childlike neediness. Segal wittily describes the eagle-eyed sharpness of a community where nothing goes unnoticed, and Adam's passage to maturity is painfully documented, but the novel inevitably lacks the gravity and restraint of Wharton's masterpiece.

I Am an Executioner by Rajesh Parameswaran (Bloomsbury, £14.99)
Parameswaran's collection is more grandiloquence than subtlety. The more sensational the subject, the less effective the tale. Subtitled "love stories", they follow Wilde's adage that "each man kills the thing he loves"  from the frenzied bloodlust unleashed by a Bengal tiger's deranged adoration of its keeper, to an unlikely mathematical genius, the memory of whom haunts the boss who dismissed him. There is an over-reliance on absurdist fable, as in the distasteful title story, in which an executioner uses the imminent killing of a young girl on death row to impress his implacable new bride. Elsewhere a man with no medical experience impersonates a doctor with predictably horrific results. Confident perversity does not compensate for a nagging lack of originality.

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney (Granta, £12.99)
For such a slim, elliptical volume, Luiselli's multi-layered novel is a difficult read. A young Mexican author with seemingly boundless intellect, Luiselli trips on her tropes and is weighed down by literary flourishes. A woman, now married with small children, reflects in an insistent and disquieting tone on her earlier life in New York, her multiple lovers and her obsession with an obscure Mexican poet, Gilberto Owen. Taking Ezra Pound's short poem "In a Station of the Metro" as inspiration, Luiselli imagines an encounter between Owen and the woman, ghosts passing through each other's timeframes. There are echoes of García Márquez's Strange Pilgrims; Bolaño, Hemingway and Emily Dickinson are all freely cited. The prose has luminous touches, but the density of expression is opaque.

The Humorist by Russell Kane (Simon & Schuster, £12.99)
Every comedian wants to deliver the punchline to end all punchlines, and in this slick, viscerally nasty book, award-winning stand-up Kane does just that. Benjamin White, a sinister comedy critic, has a forensic ability to dissect the genesis of a joke, but has never been able to smile or laugh. He has lusted after his cousin Becky for years, and has recently had drunken sex with Miranda Love, the editor on his newspaper review section who humanises the "android warmth" of Benjamin's copy into something readable. Even his family are repelled by him; this and the sneery laddishness of Benjamin's work colleagues are catalysts for the dark implosion that occurs when he discovers the formula for the ultimate gag. It's a shame that Kane's manic cleverness descends into a puerile gorefest.

In this impressive first novel, Francesca Segal transports The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of scandal among the upper classes in 1870s New York, to the Jewish community of modern-day north-west London.

Wharton's notorious Countess Ellen Olenska is recast as the beautiful 22-year-old Ellie Schneider, a model who has been kicked out of Columbia University after appearing in a porn film. As the novel opens, she makes a shocking re-entry into the tight-knit community of her birth, arriving at Kol Nidre "exposing skin from clavicle to navel, wearing a tuxedo jacket with nothing beneath it and black trousers  trousers!  that clung and shimmered as if she'd been dipped in crude oil".

Segal's May Welland is Ellie's "perfect" cousin Rachel Gilbert, demure, sheltered and innocent, newly engaged to her childhood sweetheart, 28-year-old Adam Newman, the Newland Archer figure.

Ellie is the opposite of the "nice Jewish girls" who populate Adam's world. He finds her "seedy glamour" increasingly intoxicating, while the "promise of certainty always" with Rachel as his "steady and loyal co-pilot" no longer excites him.

It's a stroke of brilliance on Segal's part to demonstrate the striking similarities between the polished social manners of waspish 19th-century New York and 21st-century Hampstead Garden Suburb  with the added frisson of a last laugh, given Wharton's antisemitism. The claustrophobia of the NW postcode is perfectly pitched  even the annual winter holiday in Eilat provides a host of "familiar faces plucked from around the upper branches of the Northern Line and deposited on the banks of the Red Sea". While Rachel "liked what she knew and was content for everything to remain precisely as it was", Adam's awakening involves the realisation that there might be "a world outside NW11".

Yet Segal makes the story her own. The tightrope Adam must walk between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the reliable and the spontaneous, has a markedly contemporary tinge; it's a dilemma that will feel relevant to almost any young person from a traditional community. As Segal observes, though, the "other side of interference was support  There was no life event  through which one need ever walk alone. Twenty-five people were always poised to help." This isn't a simple case of a young man broadening his horizons. There's a fine line between the limiting and the limitless.

The Innocents is a compelling read and Segal writes with a delicate, understated elegance. Given the current obsession with quirky anti-heros and narratives bordering on magical-realist, Segal's more traditional approach (apt, given her subject matter) is refreshing.