Come and relax — if you dare POPULAR WENDY HOLDEN

NINE PERFECT STRANGERS by Liane Moriarty (Michael Joseph £18.99, 434 pp)

THIS wonderful novel by the Big Little Lies author had me utterly hooked.

Nine people gather in Tranquillium House, a pricey Australian health spa. They are all suffering from ultracontemporary conditions.

Frances, former famous author of romantic novels, has been — irony alert! — the victim of a money-grabbing internet Romeo.

Lamborghini-driving Ben and his surgically enhanced wife have won the lottery, but are losing their marriage. There are others, some very sad, who have all come to seek the help of messianic Masha, the spa’s charismatic Russian manager.

Her unorthodox methods make hilarious reading at first, but then the tone becomes darker and more dangerous. You’ll never look at a steam room in quite the same way again.

A KEEPER by Graham Norton (Hodder £20, 324 pp) NEW YORK-based Elizabeth returns to small-town Ireland

after mammy Patricia pops her clogs. Clearing out the house, she finds letters in the back of a wardrobe which start her, and the reader, on a trail of ghastly discovery.

The story alternates between the rural Gothic horror-family who beset poor Patricia in the Seventies, and Elizabeth’s modern-day struggles with her gay ex and insubordinate son.

Can the past and present be reconciled and can there finally be a happy ending?

I loved Holding, Norton’s bittersweet debut, and this follow-up is just as full of folksy Irish atmosphere. But the characters here are less sympathetic and the tone rather bleaker than you might expect.

THE ANNIVERSARY by Hilary Boyd (Penguin £7.99, 404 pp)

JOURNALIST Jack and TV writer Stella once moved in top media circles, whizzing to the country on Sundays for power lunches with the great and good.

But, after their infant son died in someone’s swimming pool, the fantasy shattered and the golden couple split. They find other partners — Stella a Corbyn-esque gardener and Jack a plasticfantastic make- up artist considerably his junior.

But the pull of the past and the tragedy of baby Jonny haunts them both.

As their daughter, Eve, endures a difficult pregnancy, the now-acrimonious exes find themselves growing close again.

A bit sad for me, but I enjoyed the occasional flash of humour; especially Jack’s struggles to keep up with his wife and Eve’s puritanical Highland in-laws.