TIMOLEON VIETA COME HOME
By Daan Rhodes
Canongate, £6.99
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Carthusians Cockroft is a lonely, randy old goat living out his twilight years in Umbria. Timoleon Vieta, with “eyes as pretty as a little girl’s”, is his dog. Cockroft is unsurprised when a saturnine Bosnian arrives at his isolated villa; he is prodigious throughout Europe with invitations extended to attractive young bucks. He is joking when he suggests that repayment for food and lodging should be a spot of midweek fellatio, but doesn’t fall over himself to explain this when the Bosnian bends to the task. While the lodger proves adept at getting Cockcroft to pant happily, however, he elicits nothing but snarling animosity from Timoleon which, punctuated by the odd bite, leads to an ultimatum being issued. Dumped in Rome, Timoleon sets out on the path home, and Rhodes’s tale adopts the structure of a spider diagram, with miniature histories of characters the dog meets swimming briefly and entrancingly into focus. Blending fable, comedy and tragedy, Rhodes’s debut is a joy, a compassionate book adept at conveying sentiment while avoiding sentimentality.

IN SEARCH OF KLINGSOR
By Jorge Volpi
Fourth Estate, £7.99
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Klingsor, the evil magician in Wagner’s Parsifal, was the code name of a man said to control the Nazis’ scientific programmes. Francis P. Bacon, a US Army lieutenant stationed in Germany at the war’s end, is ordered to discover Klingsor’s identity. Volpi’s fitfully engaging thriller successfully relates to Wagner’s setting of the Grail romance, and describes excellently the bungled 1944 coup against Hitler, but too many of its interesting ideas fail to cohere satisfactorily.

NINETEEN EIGHTY THREE
By David Peace
Serpent’s Tail, £7.99
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With the final part of his Red Riding Quartet, Peace finishes his tortured evocation of a stark and brutal Yorkshire between 1974 and 1983. The Ripper, child murders, a society rotting from the inside and obscene police brutality are his recurring obsessions, the hopelessness of his vision made compulsively readable by the sheer force of talent fuelling his unremitting prose. Profoundly disturbing and visceral, Peace’s quartet is an achievement of exceptional and enduring quality.

NUMBER 5
By Glenn Patterson
Penguin, £6.99
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When is a house more than a home? In this case, when Patterson superbly elevates number 5 on a suburban Belfast street to a character in its own right. Five sets of tenants pass through it over the course of 50 years, the reader becoming a willing fencepost gossip and spectator of the shifting sands of tradition and social change. Attuned to personal event and historical sweep, Patterson is building an admirable body of work.

MAKING LOVE
By Marius Brill
Black Swan, £6.99
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When Miranda Brown finds a mysterious old romance novel in the Shepherds Bush Library she becomes the target of the security services, certain that they had destroyed every copy. This book, it seems, has the power to change humanity’s concept of where love comes from and what it is for. It also falls in love with its reader. Brill concocts a winningly audacious plot and shoehorns in enough rapid-fire jokes to make Groucho Marx blush.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

FUGITIVES AND REFUGEES
By Chuck Palahniuk
Vintage, £6.99
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