HUMOUR

WHEN YOU READ THIS by Mary Adkins (Hodder £16.99, 384 pp)

IRIS maSSey is just 33 when she dies. For four years, she had worked alongside Smith Simonyi, providing PR for a series of oddball clients with outlandish promotion plans. now, Smith is adrift, struggling to cope with the loss of Iris, his own gambling problem and the ineptitude of his egotistical, earnest intern, Carl.

The discovery of Iris’s secret blog and his attempts to publish it bring him into contact with Iris’s grieving sister, Jade, who’s thinking of pursuing a malpractice case against Iris’s doctor and is against revealing her sibling’s final thoughts to the world.

This gentle tragicomedy unfolds in a series of text messages, blog posts and emails charting the ups and downs of Jade and Smith’s relationship and Carl’s calamities, while dealing sensitively with loss.

OH, I DO LIKE TO BE . . . by Marie Phillips (Unbound £8.99, 176 pp)

MARIE PHILLIPS’S jaunty third novel is daft of plot, deft of prose and, occasionally, as exasperating as its source material, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of errors.

Transplanted to a British seaside town, old pubs, dour B&Bs and windy, hilly streets provide the perfect backdrop as two sets of cloned twins — who share names, as well as genetics — pinball around town, ricocheting into a small cast of characters who are left confused and bemused by the encounters of the physically identical, but emotionally diverse, pairs.

The two Billys’ Dna is derived from William Shakespeare, while the Sallys are cloned from a random hair found at the back of a bus.

mistaken identities, emotional upheavals, work envy, parental dilemmas and disgruntled traffic wardens all play their part as the twins work out their true destinies.

ANN DEVINE, READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP by Colm O’Regan (Transworld £12.99, 368 pp)

Colm o’Regan is the bestselling author of the Irish mammies series of novels.

Here, he introduces a new mammie, endearing care worker ann Devine, who wears fleeces, loves a gossip and is a little insecure out of her comfort zone in rural Kilsudgeon.

Her mettle is tested when she takes on the leadership role in a tidy town competition, challenges local corruption and tackles the drunken antics of Hollywood star Cody Bryan when he and his entourage arrive to film a Celtic myth version of game of Thrones: all man buns, fast broadband, financial skullduggery and day- long sessions in the pub.

o’Regan offers laugh-out-loud observations of small-town life and eccentric characters, which, just occasionally, stray into cliché.