THE BEST NEW FICTION

Useless Miracle Barry Schechter

Melville House £14.99 As the pint-sized chairperson of Hermeneutics at a US university, wisecracking George belongs to a rich tradition of campus satire. Then he acquires the knack of levitating several inches off the ground. Just a cunning party trick? Or a true

21st Century miracle? It is a nice little riddle and, as the plot thickens, George proves such an engagingly self-deprecating narrator that you want to know where his strange odyssey will end.

Max Davidson

Cardiff, By The Sea

Joyce Carol Oates Head of Zeus £18.99

The admirably unflagging Oates returns with a stylish, suspenseful quartet of novellas tinged with the supernatural. In the title story – set not in Wales but a fictitious town in Maine – a young woman inherits a house, and with it the traumatic truth about her adoption as a toddler. Elsewhere, the ghost of Sylvia Plath hovers, and a college student named Alyce tumbles down an alarming rabbit hole like Lewis Carroll’s heroine.

Hephzibah Anderson

Victoria Park Gemma Reeves

Allen & Unwin £14.99 This kaleidoscopic debut portrays a London community reeling from an acid attack. Following rapid gentrification, the old East Enders rub along with the new – gangsters, tailors, yuppies and yogis. Reeves weaves a tapestry of intersecting lives, moving from adolescence to motherhood, marital breakdown to dementia. While it can feel somewhat laboured at times, it should entice proud Hackneyites.

Madeleine Feeny

33 Women Isabel Ashdown

Trapeze £8.99

Celine has come to Arundel to sort out her dead mother’s house. When a young woman is murdered nearby, in circumstances reminiscent of her own sister’s killing years before, she has no choice but to stay and investigate. There’s clearly a link to the secretive women’s commune next door. Is it really the oasis from a misogynist world that it aspires to be? Ashdown skilfully incorporates big moral questions into a thoroughly compelling thriller. John Williams