The Book of Life by Stuart Nadler (Picador, £12.99)
Rueful melancholy and caustic humour permeate these impressive stories, set on America's chilly east coast. Populated overwhelmingly by non-observant Jews, the book is awash with a lively regret, as parental death is explored: "Our Portion, Our Rock" sees a young lawyer in a cut-throat corporate environment balking at a career in which he needs to succeed in order to pay his father's hospital bills. In "Visiting", a man and his estranged teenaged son unexpectedly bond over the man's relationship with his own dying father. The tone is set by the brilliant, bombastic opener, a tragicomic farce playing out over the 10 Days of Awe between Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur, in which a man's brief affair with his business partner's daughter goes disastrously wrong.
The Incident by Kenneth Macleod (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99)
Not one but three incidents comprise Macleod's gripping (albeit overlong) debut. Craig is haunted by the deaths of two children on his watch as a student lifeguard one summer in Germany just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The accident is indirectly linked to his grandfather, who survived when his ship was hit by a torpedo during the second world war. The course of the long, hot day leading up to the tragedy on the beach pulsates with dread and fear, and is engrossingly broken up by a middle section describing a man named Gerd's astonishing escape from East Berlin as a teenager in 1969. As a former journalist, Macleod has an eye for detailed reporting, but excessive detail bogs the story down and while each of the three elements works well separately, they don't cohere as a whole.
Signs of Life by Anna Raverat (Picador, £12.99)
The aftermath of a casual relationship gone wrong here provides a moral tale for our time. In Rachel, surveying the mess at a distance of 10 years, we have a narrator subject to fits and starts of memory and unreliability. This untrustworthiness, and Raverat's classy, accomplished prose, make for a work of intense claustrophobia. Twentysomethings Rachel and Johnny are seemingly happily settled in their London life. Their contentment is "like warm blue water very wide, and very deep". Rachel is edgy, unkempt, a nervous smoker and drinker. She wants to mix it up, and when pursued by an older colleague, Carl, succumbs to his singular attentions, even though she knows she will lose Johnny and her valued stability. Rachel's culpability, combined with Carl's volatile obsessiveness, combine in disaster. Despite Rachel's terse assertion that "this is not a confession", it certainly reads like one.
The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh (Viking, £12.99)
This historical fiction based around the South African diamond industry in the late 19th century is a romantic saga with its origins in the author's discovery of a real-life cover-up of a devastating smallpox epidemic in the region. Frances Irvine, the only child of a wealthy Irish businessman, is left penniless when her father's death reveals colossal debts. Rejected by her late mother's aristocratic family, Frances is forced to accept an offer of marriage from distant cousin Edwin Matthews, a doctor making a new start in colonial South Africa. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the vulnerable yet headstrong Frances falls for the handsome diamond trafficker William Westbrook on the voyage out, and her path to maturity amid the raw terrain of the Karoo is painstakingly charted. Though the clichés need taming, McVeigh has a delicate touch, and the book is an absorbing, if unnuanced read.
