SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS
By javier Cercas
Bloomsbury, £6.99

At the tail-end of the Spanish Civil War, fleeing Republicans put 50 prominent Nationalists to death in a forest clearing. One who escaped alive was the author and poet Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Spain’s premier fascist ideologue, who hid, only to be discovered by a Republican who, inexplicably, kept silent. Cercas’s reflexive novel describes how the author first heard this story in 1994 and spent the next six years researching it in order to write this novel.

While there is a great deal of truth in Soldiers of Salamis, there is also a huge amount of verisimilitude — it even offers a superlative compressed account of the civil war. Cercas’s sly manoeuvrings between fact and fiction are not the postmodernist’s unmasking of universal meaninglessness; they represent instead a hugely involving affirmation of literature as path to truth.

LAURA: A JOURNEY INTO THE CRYSTAL
By George Sand
Pushkin Press, £10

A bagatelle to begin with, this newly translated 1864 novella pales further when measured against Sand’s great works of prototypically feminist social drama. Nevertheless its symbolist exploration of young love, in which a geologist relates how desire for his cousin transported him “into the enchanted world of the crystallo-geodic system”, is endearingly eccentric.

THE ENDS OF OUR TETHERS
By Alasdair Gray
Canongate, £6.99

This new collection has a playful air, but, as is so often the case with Gray, even his most flippant-seeming tales linger and reveal unsuspected depths. Stories such as Aiblins, in which a creative writing teacher fears that he may have figuratively smothered a great poet at birth, leave you in no doubt that you are in the presence of a modern master.

FEAR AND TREMBLING
By Amélie Nothomb
Faber, £6.99

The Japanese-born Belgian author Nothomb has written a caustic account of life for a young Westerner inside a large Japanese company. Amélie plummets down the corporate ladder, her situation worsened by an ignorance of Japanese behavioural norms and an inability to observe them correctly. Nothomb’s novel is a darkly humorous microscopic study of cultural differences.

THE MEMORY MAN
By Lisa Appignanesi
Arcadia, £11.99

The distinguished Jewish neuroscientist Bruno Lind returns for the first time since 1946 to Central Europe where, in the company of his adopted daughter, a journalist and a fellow neuroscientist, he confronts his harrowing past. Appignanesi’s evocation of the war is involving, but the modern-day narrative hits some false notes.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

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