THE BEST NEW FICTION

Again, Rachel Marian Keyes

Michael Joseph £20

Incredibly, 25 years have passed since Keyes unleashed Rachel’s Holiday.

Its hotly awaited sequel finds her heroine much changed: now working as an addiction counsellor, Rachel has found love and discovered gardening, and temptation exists solely in the form of yet another pair of expensive trainers. But then up pops her ex. Funny, frank and fresh, this hearttugging drama is a perfect distillation of all that makes Keyes’s voice so very beguiling.

Hephzibah Anderson

Brown Girls Daphne Palasi Andreades

Fourth Estate

£12.99

The titular young women hail from Queens, New York, and are not simply one shade of brown but the ‘colour of grilled hamburger patties… colour of peanut butter’. Andreades writes engagingly about the conflict between the girls’ immigrant backgrounds and the American culture they seek to embrace, but for all the energy and sensitivity of its prose, this debut novel is largely plotless.

Alex Peake-Tomkinson

Violets Alex Hyde Granta £12.99

Towards the end of the Second World War, a woman suffers a stillbirth and is left desolate as her husband is deployed overseas. Meanwhile, another woman conceals her pregnancy to join up and is sent to Italy. The twist? Both are named Violet, and their alternating stories eventually merge. Brimming with bodily fluids, and written in staccato sentences interspersed with fragments of verse, this ambitious novel bites off more than it can chew.

Anthony Gardner

The Matchmaker Paul Vidich

No Exit £9.99

The latest in Vidich’s terrific series of Cold

War spy thrillers takes us right up to Berlin, 1989, and the tense moments before the Wall fell. Anne Simpson is just another translator until her husband fails to return from a business trip, and she’s forced to confront the fact that he’s an East German spy with a whole lot of stolen money. What follows is a tense, smart and thoroughly believable story of revenge and redemption.

John Williams