STANDARD DEVIATION

by Katherine Heiny (4th Estate £12.99)

Provided you’re not embarrassed by laughing loudly in public, Katherine Heiny’s tale is the best feel-good novel around this year.

New Yorker Graham finds his beautiful second wife Audra both exhilarating and exhausting. She is one of the great comic creations of our times; a motormouth who talks to complete strangers and discusses intimate secrets on public transport.

She should be irritating, but she’s so intelligent, well-meaning, funny and kind to everyone she meets that she’s impossible not to love — though perhaps she is impossible to live with, which is Graham’s problem when his first wife reenters his life.