The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth

by William Boyd Viking 256pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £12.99

William Boyd’s latest book “sits somewhere between a collection of stories and a novel”, said Alex Preston in the Financial Times. The stories are linked (with characters and images recurring) and the collection’s wonderfully written centrepiece is a novella-length tale about a “spoilt” young woman’s long – and ultimately unsuccessful – search for a career. The piece could easily have been “vicious” satire, but Boyd saves it from being so by “marrying icy detachment with real compassion”.

Elsewhere, the stories are more “glossily knowing”, said Elizabeth Lowry in The Guardian. As ever, Boyd revels in writerly tricks, such as narrating a love affair backwards in a “series of wry vignettes” and breaking off a Bond-like caper before its denouement. Unfailingly amusing though these pieces are, they sometimes “strive for effects of pathos that the urbane narrative angle can’t quite support”. For example, in one story about a narcissistic art dealer, Boyd seems so wedded to the character’s “smugly superficial voice” that we don’t particularly care when things go wrong.

Björk: Utopia One Little Indian Records £9.99

After 2015’s austere, extreme Vulnicura, which charted the sorrows of a relationship breakdown, Björk “exudes a lust for life again” on her self-styled “Tinder album”, a hope-filled set powered by flutes and birdsong (Observer).