DEBUT FICTION

FANNY BLAKE

THE THINGS WE THOUGHT WE KNEW by Mahsuda Snaith (Doubleday £14.99)

The 18-year-old Ravine Roy has been bedbound in a council flat in Leicester for the past ten years, suffering from chronic pain syndrome. She has also been grieving over the disappearance of her best friend, Marianne.

In her ‘pain diary’ she writes to Marianne, recalling their friendship.

As the novel opens, she stages a sudden recovery, but keeps it secret as she adjusts to facing the outside world. The walls of the flat are thin and she can hear her mother entertaining a mysterious man, as well as what’s being said in the next-door flat, in the room that was once Marianne’s.

Snaith has a delightfully fresh voice and vividly conveys the claustrophobic nature of Ravine’s situation as the mystery of what happened ten years earlier is gradually revealed.

THE FIRST DAY by Phil Harrison

(Fleet £12.99) TheIR clandestine affair begins when Anna Stuart is 26 and Samuel Orr is 38. She is a Beckett scholar and poet, teaching at Queen’s University, Belfast. he is a pastor, married with three children, but unable to resist her.

When Anna becomes pregnant, the consequences are deep- seated and long-lasting, reaching right into the heart of Samuel’s family until an act of violence divides them for ever.

More than 30 years later, Anna and Orr’s son Sam is living in New York, working at the Met. But the ghosts of the past are not easily laid to rest. When his older halfbrother comes searching for him, he cannot ignore them any longer. Written with a burning intensity, this is a powerful novel about marriage, passion, anger and guilt.

MAD by Chloe Esposito

(Michael Joseph £12.99) INTROdUcINg Alvina Knightly, badass anti-heroine of the first book in a trilogy, to be followed by Bad and then dangerous To Know. having lost her job and her flat, Alvina takes up her identical twin sister Beth’s invitation to stay with her in Sicily.

Beth has everything: a handsome husband (with whom Alvina has history), a baby, a beautiful home and loads of money. But Beth has an ulterior motive. She begs Alvina to swap places with her, an arrangement that ends in her death and Alvina keeping Beth’s identity.

So begins this brash, far-fetched caper that has Alvina up to her neck in designer labels, hot sex and trouble.

The secondary characters are ciphers, the plot outrageous — but it kept me reading.