Fever that burns inside

LITTLE SCRATCH

Faber, £8.99

On the face of it, not much happens. An unnamed narrator wakes up, goes to her newspaper office job and meets her boyfriend in the evening for poetry and drinks. But under the surface a lot is going on. Throughout the day, she struggles with the nervous compulsion to scratch her legs and the dilemma of whether or not to reveal to her boyfriend that she has been sexually assaulted by her boss. Little Scratch is an experimental internal monologue that fragments, repeats, arranges itself into columns and forms patterns resembling concrete poetry. This typographical turmoil is our narrator’s mind working feverishly to process what’s happening to her, cope with her trauma and protect her. It’s an impressive study of alienation and power, in the workplace and beyond, that resists trite answers and easily digestible resolutions.

UNSETTLED GROUND Claire Fuller Penguin, £8.99

Since their father died in a tractor accident 40 years earlier, 51-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius have lived in seclusion with their mother, Dot, in a cottage in the English countryside. Now Dot has died, the twins are thrust into a dizzying world of technology and digital interconnectedness they can’t comprehend – while facing the prospect of losing their home. They also have to come to terms with the realisation that their mother kept them with her at home by spinning a web of lies, covering up family secrets. Fuller’s restrained and moving coming-of-age story allows the twins to be themselves, in all their oddness, and doesn’t go out of its way to make us like them. Instead, by holding up a mirror to the complex world we take for granted, she gradually persuades us that their unconventional lifestyle has value.

THE PEOPLE’S CITY

Various authors

Polygon, £7.99

The fourth anthology in aid of the OneCity Trust contains five short stories set in Edinburgh. In Anne Hamilton’s The Finally Tree, the son Alina gave up for adoption has finally located his biological father, but a 25-year deception is still to be resolved. Nadine Aisha Jassat’s narrator sees a ghost in Pilrig which becomes part of her quest to get to know Edinburgh and its “living echoes”. Alexander McCall Smith’s wistful In Sandy Bell’s is steeped in the late 1950s, with student digs, amateur photography and a Hamish Henderson cameo, while Ian Rankin depicts the reunion between two brothers when one is released from prison. And in Sara Sheridan’s On Portobello Prom, a photographer gets embroiled in a marriage arranged by an Italian ice cream dynasty in 1961. Engrossing, resonant stories, with no weak links.