OUT OF BREATH by Julie Myerson Cape £12.99 pp298

Like a character escaped from a Saki short story, a ragged boy appears in the garden of the house where discontented adolescent Flynn lives and his presence tempts her to leave home to join forces with him. Together with the mysteriously alluring boy, and with the teenage mother and stroppy six-year-old girl who are his companions, Flynn and her brother Sam discover a strange house in the woods which at first offers a refuge but soon reveals itself as a place of threats and dangers as well as comforts. Myerson’s story carries echoes of other narratives of children in flight from the adult world but these only serve to emphasise its ultimate shortage of imaginative energy and the thinness of the fictional fare it provides.

THE OUTCAST by Sadie Jones Cape £12.99 pp348

Small towns find few advocates in fiction. Waterford, the invented setting for Jones’s story, is no exception to this rule, and her central character, Lewis Aldridge, growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, becomes a victim of the commuter-belt township’s hypocrisy and repression. Traumatised by his mother’s accidental drowning, Lewis as a boy finds little understanding of his grief in his father’s tight-lipped refusal to acknowledge his own sorrow or in the neighbours’ desire to turn their backs on the whole messy business. As a troubled young man, newly released from prison, he returns to Waterford to find worse ordeals await him. Jones’s elegantly written debut novel brings to vivid life both her alienated and damaged protagonist and the small-minded community that condemns him.

MONSTER LOVE by Carol Topolski Fig Tree £16.99 pp264

Brendan and Sherilyn are soul mates whose intense preoccupation with each other precludes the disturbance of parenthood. Their unwanted daughter is first ignored, then abused and finally abandoned to starve slowly to death. Told in a sequence of cleverly realised narrative voices (those of Brendan and Sherilyn, of neighbours, family and professionals forced to deal with the crime), Monster Love rarely fails to grip the attention but falls clumsily between fictional stools. Is it a journey into the heart of darkness or into the heart of a social-services report? Is it gothic horror or a grimly realistic analysis of an obsession with the perfect relationship? In her first novel, Topolski tries on several fictional styles but none seems to fit entirely comfortably.

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