THE BEST NEW FICTION

Spoils Brian van Reet Jonathan Cape €15.99

This stunning debut novel by a former soldier who served in Iraq covers an eight-week period in 2003, during the early days of the US invasion, when 19-year-old Cassandra Wig heard and two of her tank crew are captured by a rogue mujahideen group somewhere outside Fallujah. Unsurprisingly, it has the ring of absolute authenticity, and van Reet clearly articulates the violent mechanics of modern warfare. But this is, above all, a human story, a psychological drama between ideologically opposed captor and captive played out in the fog of war. A powerful and compelling narrative that gathers pace as the search for the lost soldier intensifies.

Simon Humphreys

Gravel Heart Abdulrazak Gurnah Bloomsbury€15

Gurnah, a Man Booker shortlister, revisits the immigrant experience in his ninth novel. At the centre is a desultory and unremarkable coming-of-age story but framing it is a colourful tale of life in a Zanzibar village where passions and politics reshape a family. Salim is seven when his father leaves to live in a shack apart from wife and son. After years of fitful study and work in England, Salim returns to Zanzibar to learn of a marriage’s dark secrets – he’s struck by the resemblance to Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure – in two nights and 100 pages of powerful narrative.

Jeffrey Burke

The House Of Names Colm Tóibín Viking €12.99, out on May 18

What is Colm Tóibín doing recycling a story that the great Greek dramatists told far more effectively back in the fifth century BC? Tóibín is a very fine novelist, who could not write an ugly sentence if he tried. And the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and their children continues to have a timeless resonance. War, and the sacrifices made in the name of war, will always be topical. So will dysfunctional families. But it is very hard to engage emotionally with such a hand-medown story as this. Unfortunately, Tóibín’s book just feels like a rather timid literary pastiche. Max Davidson