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ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE by Gail Honeyman (HarperCollins, hardback £12.99, ebook £7.99)

THERE are some books whose narrator is so well-written, so human and instantly engaging, that they have you right from the first line.

Such is the case with Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant. It’s unremarkable as first lines go, “When people ask me what I do – taxi drivers, hairdressers – I tell them I work in an office”, but it poses questions and tees up the most heartwarming and refreshing debut I’ve read in some time.

Eleanor has worked at the same boring job for eight years. She has the same routine: home to her council flat, the Archers and pasta with pesto and salad for tea.

On a Friday evening, she buys a margarita pizza and two bottles of vodka to see her through the weekend: “Monday takes a long time to come round”.

Eleanor, who’s 31, was in care through much of her childhood and has hazy flashbacks to a traumatic event. When scruffy new office IT guy Raymond and Eleanor see an elderly man take a tumble, it draws the two of them together into a tentative friendship, which will eventually help to set Eleanor free.

THE ICE by Laline Paull, Fourth Estate, £12.99 (ebook £7.99).

THE second novel from the author of the much-praised The Bees is set in the near future and the action alternates between Britain and Arctic Norway as “very modern buccaneer” Sean Cawson pursues commercial success in Europe’s far north, while haunted by the accidental (or was it?) death of his business partner, environmentally aware Tom Harding.

Clues that this is set a few years from now include the fact that most of the ice at the North Pole has melted, opening a trade route across the top of the world and raising the prospect of both the exploitation of natural resources and great-power territorial disputes.

This could have been preachy in a green sort of way but isn’t. And much of the action takes place in that under-used source of drama, the British coroner’s court.