THE BEST NEW FICTION

The Librarian Salley Vickers Viking €18.20

When young librarian Sylvia Blackwell arrives in prim East Mole in 1959, she’s full of plans. But it’s she who is in for an education, as her idealistic meddling derails a boy’s life, shakes a marriage and costs her her job. Fast-forward to the present day, and one of the children whose reading she steered is returning, a famous author, to campaign against the library’s closure. This nostalgic treat springs from Vickers’s own girlhood, and though you might wish she’d had faith enough in the power of storytelling to omit some clunky sermonising, it’s involving and hopeful.

Hephzibah Anderson

Patient X David Peace Faber €20.99

The life and work of the Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa inspire this intense collection of stories. Partly biographical, but more an exploration of his obsessions, it conjures up a surreal world in which madmen, doppelgangers and demons rub shoulders with Christ, Buddha and Jack the Ripper. The narrative is a hall of mirrors in which it’s often unclear which character is being written about – or who is doing the writing. But it’s one of the most original and intriguing books you’ll read this year.

Anthony Gardner

All The Beautiful Girls Elizabeth J Church Fourth Estate €18.20

This flawed but eminently readable second novel follows plucky Lily Decker from a childhood blighted by abuse in late-Fifties’ Kansas to her metamorphosis into Las Vegas showgirl Ruby Wilde. Ruby performs alongside Tom Jones and spends a week with an astronaut. Church’s prose is taut and compelling, with rich period detail that evokes the dazzling artifice of classic Vegas, but the wooden dialogue, thinly conceived characters and predictable plotlines leave the tale feeling almost as hollow as the synthetic world it depicts.

Gwen Smith