Paperbacks

Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep (Arrow, 432pp, £8.99) is a ‘work of speculative fiction set in Britain 800 years into the future, after a “systemic collapse of technical civilisation” known as the Apocalypse’, explained Alex Preston in the Guardian. ‘Into the void of the “Dark Age” steps a rejuvenated and dogmatic church, whose authoritarian rule and obsessive suppression of heretical “scientism” ensure that people live in brutal and backward conditions.’ Harry Sidebottom in the Telegraph, thought the novel ‘genuinely thrilling’. And David Sexton in the Evening Standard called it ‘a truly surprising future-history thriller. Fabulous, really.’

Two young girls go missing in an isolated town in rural Russia – this is the theme of Julia Phillips’s debut novel Disappearing Earth (Scribner, 272pp, £8.99). ‘Each of the novel’s 13 chapters is told from the perspective of a character,’ explained Laura Miller in the New Yorker... It doesn’t ‘much concern itself with the search for the girls’, she continued. ‘Instead, with each new character’s perspective, it builds a portrait of a place.’ Sarah Moss in the Guardian had some reservations, but thought Phillips could certainly write: ‘characters, dialogue, pacing, the fine balancing of what is shown and what goes unsaid are all done with aplomb.’