THE BEST NEW FICTION

A Theatre For Dreamers Polly Samson Bloomsbury €19.60

To a teenage girl from England, in mourning for her dead mother, the Greek island of Hydra seems like an earthly paradise. The year is 1960 and the picturesque, car-free island has attracted bohemian types from all over the globe, including the young Leonard Cohen. Erica, Samson’s impressionable young heroine, soon finds herself on the fringes of an uncharted world of free love, nude swimming and heavy drinking. This well-crafted novel beautifully captures the texture of a halcyon age.

Max Davidson

Jack & Bet Sarah Butler Picador €20.99

Kind, quiet Jack Chalmers is besotted with his wife of 70 years, the garrulous, glamorous Bet. Age is taking its toll however, and their son, the oft-married Tommy, wants them to move into sheltered accommodation. A chance meeting with a Romanian student seems to offer a lifeline, enabling them to stay put while she helps out around their flat, but her presence prompts the spilling of old secrets. This is a tender, unsentimental exploration of lifelong companionship, beautifully capturing the pangs of ageing and the treacheries of time.

Eithne Farry

Aria Nazanine Hozar Viking €16.99

This intricate novel tells the story of Aria, an abandoned new-born baby who is found and adopted by Behrouz, a lowly army driver, and of the three different women who mother her at various stages of her life. Set in a vibrantly depicted Tehran and spanning a 30-year period leading up to the 1981 Iranian Revolution, Hozar’s serpentine narrative shows how the inequality and corruption of Iranian society under the Shah gives way to something more sinister. While it could have done with a little more editing, it’s a spellbinding debut.

Simon Humphreys

The Night Watchman Louise Erdrich Corsair €17.99

It’s 1953 and Thomas Wazhushk leaves Turtle Mountain Reservation and travels to Washington, striving to defeat legislation that would abolish native tribes and relocate Native Americans. Meanwhile, in one of several sidebars, Thomas’s feisty niece, Pixie, searches for her sister. Erdrich’s restless eye captures moments and years of the North Dakota reservation’s hardscrabble life and rich traditions. Ghosts unnerve, spirits dance, and magic may be why a foiled rapist gets a twisted mouth. A beguiling storyteller.

Jeffrey Burke