Who is lying about the past?

TANGERINE by Christine Mangan (Little, Brown €20.99)

TAKING Patricia Highsmith’s thriller The Talented Mr Ripley as its touchstone, Tangerine heads to Morocco in 1956 to tell the tale of a friendship gone badly, menacingly awry.

There are two narrators, both entirely unreliable, and a plot as twisty as the labyrinthine streets of its dazzling, befuddling Tangier setting, but a languor of pace undermines a promising premise.

Rich, orphaned Alice Shipley is more than glad to be college roommates with Lucy Mason, who appears like a kind of ‘knight in shining armour’ to the lonely, mentally vulnerable girl — until Lucy’s predilections for obsessive behaviour, gaslighting and reinvention sever their relationship in the most dramatic of ways.

Now married to the unfaithful John, and unwilling to leave her Tangier apartment, Alice’s careful life is once again upended when Lucy reappears like ‘a genie . . . unwillingly conjured up’.

ONLY CHILD by Rhiannon Navin (Mantle €18.20)

SIX-YEAR-OLD Zach and his classmates are huddled in a closet in their American primary school, listening as the ‘POP POP POP’ of gunfire gets ever closer.

Within minutes, 19 people are dead, including Zach’s older brother, Andy.

His family is changed for ever: his mother embarks on a bitter quest for justice and his father is overwhelmed by guilt and grief.

Narrator Zach, a sweet boy, awash with ‘hot, mad tears’, is left to deal with a welter of emotions — ‘I never knew you could feel more than one feeling inside of you at the same time.’

This is a sensitive, moving (and occasionally overly sentimental) exploration of a child’s struggles to repair his fractured family and make sense of an incomprehensible world.

BITTER by Francesca Jakobi (W&N €19.60)

LIFE has been a wrenching disappointment to twicedivorced, middle-aged Gilda Meyer. She is the selfdeluding, guilt-ridden narrator of Jakobi’s riveting study of a woman who takes motherly concern to rather sinister extremes.

She loves her married son, Reuben, beyond measure, but is sorely estranged from him. ‘The hopeless wait for visits that don’t happen, the empty letterbox, the unanswered phone calls’ take their toll and she watches his house, spying on his wife Alice and lying to her best friend.

But, as her story unfurls — a loveless childhood, a marriage of convenience to her brusque father’s business partner and a pregnancy beset by fear — it slowly, tantalisingly becomes clear that Gilda has never been in charge of her life.

She’s been ‘jostled, talked into things, told what to do . . .’ and shocking secrets from her past will have the power to transform her present.