DEBUTS

ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE (HarperCollins £12.99) hAs there ever been such an endearing and quirky female character as Eleanor Oliphant, a woman whose life is governed by routine?

in the week she works as a finance clerk, at weekends she retreats to her flat with pizza and a couple of bottles of vodka. This all changes when she and a friend from the office help a stranger who has collapsed in the street. This act of kindness marks the beginning of Eleanor stepping out of her selfimposed comfort zone.

reading this made me laugh and cry. As Eleanor’s traumatic past emerges, my heart went out to her, willing her forward as she reconnects to life in this uplifting and heart-warming novel. HISTORY OF WOLVES (W&N £12.99) LiNDA lives with her parents in what’s left of an old commune in the woods of northern Minnesota. she has become an observant and self- possessed teenager, intrigued by a new teacher, whose interest in at least one of his young pupils is more than scholastic.

When Patra and her four-year-old son Paul move into the house across the lake, Linda is hired to babysit. But when Leo, Patra’s husband, arrives, she is excluded from the family unit and events hurtle towards the tragic conclusion that has been hinted at from the beginning of the novel.

The adult Linda looks back at these traumatic and transformative childhood events, making her point about the discrepancy between thought and action.

A vivid sense of place and grim foreboding make this Booker- shortlisted novel hard to put down. GATHER THE DAUGHTERS (Tinder Press £18.99) FOur young women live on an island somewhere off the coast of America, sometime in the future.

They dream of escape from the patriarchal dystopia for, once they reach puberty — and after a summer of wild ‘fruition’ when the usual rules don’t apply — they must marry, breed and live under their husbands’ strict control.

But each of the girls begins to resist her proscribed future.

An obvious comparison is Margaret Atwood’s The handmaid’s Tale, and Melamed is more than equal a writer.

her prose is exact, the premise chilling and her characters all too plausible.