Dentist will fill you with laughs

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL by Nina Stibbe (Viking £12.99, 288 pp)

MISFIT lit is the new big thing. Following Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant, books about offbeat types in unpromising locations abound.

Here, we are in Eighties Leicester and heroine Lizzie Vogel is training to be a dental nurse. The surgery’s full of crazy, often delusional, characters and there’s a strong Sue Townsend/Alan Bennett flavour to it all.

Meet JP, the dentist who’s desperate to be a Freemason, Tammy, his broody assistant, and Andy, the lab technician and unlikely Romeo. At home is Lizzie’s mother, a budding writer a la Adrian Mole.

While I enjoyed it, I found it slightly overpowering. But it is funny and sweet, and there are many touching moments.

If you love the Eighties (who doesn’t?), you’ll enjoy all the carefully observed music and clothes references, too.

THE ROSIE RESULT by Graeme Simsion (Michael Joseph £14.99, 384 pp)

FANS of The Rosie Project will love this third novel in the series, in which Rosie and Don tackle son Hudson’s struggles at school.

He’s socially hopeless, rubbish at sport and his grades are tanking.

The headmistress thinks he’s autistic, but his parents are resisting the analysis. Don, who’s got time on his hands after losing his professorship, applies his boffin-esque logic to sorting out his son.

He outsources Hudson’s various problems to experts in the field, with impressive results. But there are some dark elements out there — especially the horrible father of Hudson’s only friend.

It’s heart-warming and clever, but Don and Rosie’s chilled parenting style is hard to take.

BOWLAWAY by Elizabeth McCracken (Cape £16.99, 384 pp)

McCRACKEN’S book is a little McCrackers — a woman falls from the sky, lands in a graveyard and survives to open a bowling alley.

We’re in the New England of the early 20th century and there’s a strong American Gothic, magical realism feel. The characters are all misfits and are not just colourful, but positively psychedelic.

Heroine Bertha Truitt is the most appealing, striding through the story in her divided skirt, drawing the lonely, bereaved and damaged into her unconventional, friendly orbit.

But who is she really? Or any of us, come to that? As we follow Bertha and her family down the generations, the answer seems to be that people are strange, life is random and what matters is love.