NOWHERE MAN
By Aleksandar Hemon
Picador, £6.99

Jozef Pronek first appeared in Hemon’s 2000 debut collection of stories The Question of Bruno. Nowhere Man looks at him, stranded in Chicago in 1992 by the siege of Sarajevo, from the points of view of assorted narrators. In this roundabout way we are eventually left with an account of his first 33 years of life without ever quite getting inside his head. Hemon artfully hard-wires the alienation of the refugee into his novel’s structure and shuns any more heavy-handed symbolism to concentrate on his strengths. Cardinal among these are his sublime comic touch (“The paradigm for his songs was provided by Yesterday, and they resembled one another so much that Pronek often hallucinated he had a style”), and his ability to make seemingly any detail memorable (“Pronek feels abrupt sorrow, dragging his suitcase with its blocked hind wheels leaving two trails behind, like the heels of a corpse”). Straddling the psychic border between Old Europe and America, Hemon’s talent allows the reader to experience the modern world afresh.

VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE ROOM
By Tibor Fischer
Vintage, £6.99

Taking his lead from Huysmans’s novel A rebours, Fischer has his rich heroine, Oceane, deciding not to set foot outside her rooms, satisfied that “London is deliverable”. Reality intrudes when a letter from her dead ex, Walter, arrives, and Oceane tries to locate a miscreant from her past. The book has its moments, but those familiar with Fischer’s work might be left longing for the author who flouted narrative conventions with such brio.

WELL
By Matthew McIntosh
Faber, £7.99

Their characters all linked geographically by Federal Way, a blue-collar Seattle suburb, and metaphysically by a sorrowfulness edging towards emotional vacuity, McIntosh’s debut collection of stories is uneven but worthwhile. Best by far is Fishboy, in which the minefield of young, unrequited love concludes with a disturbing descent into surreality as shadowy figures calmly dismember the story’s lead character beside a country road. On this showing, at least, McIntosh is a writer to watch.

ALMOST BLUE
By Carlo Lucarelli
Vintage, £6.99

Lucarelli’s short and nasty noir thriller is a treat from beginning to end. Ispettore Negro, part of a crime squad specialising in assassani seriale, becomes involved in a case in Bologna in which a previous victim appears to be present at each subsequent murder. Triangulating his viewpoints between the policeman, the killer and a blind man who trawls the airwaves each night via a scanner, Lucarelli exerts a terrific narrative force on the reader.

THE NEW PENGUIN BOOK OF GAY SHORT STORIES
Ed. David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell
Penguin, £9.99

This collection updates the original 1994 anthology which distinguished itself by concentrating, as the editors note in their introduction, on “gay literature that (is) literature first and gay second”. What follows is a consistently rewarding feast of notably diverse stories from, to name but a few, Lawrence, Forster, Updike, Noël Coward, Donald Windham, Allan Gurganus and William Trevor’s excellent Torridge.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

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