A BLADE OF GRASS
By Lewis Desoto
Maia, £8.99

Set in the borderlands of South Africa at a time of unrest (DeSoto seems determined to leave the date vague) this outstanding debut novel describes the evolving relationship between Märit, a farmer’s wife, and Tembi, her maid. Following the murder of Märit’s husband, the matter of control of the farm and the subsequent desertion of its workforce, is mirrored in the armed struggle for control of the region and the flight of the white population. DeSoto is not an author who uses a phrase or passage lightly: his heady evocations of bucolic lushness are tempered by a later desolation, while the intricate seesawing of affection and resentment between Märit and Tembi represents a cogent portrayal of race relations during the apartheid era. The trials of almost Biblical hardships they endure lend their union, and subsequent dissolution, the power of myth without sacrificing the novel’s realist heart. As the region empties of civilians the two women are granted a reprieve from repression, but their cherished solitude carries within it the chilling vulnerability of isolation.

THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV
By Victor Serge
NYRB, £9.99

In Serge’s 1947 masterpiece about the Great Terror, Comrade Tulayev of the Central Committee is murdered in the street by a Young Communist, the crime becoming an excuse for another round of purges of the Revolution’s old guard. Serge’s bending to the fiction writer’s task of world building had remarkable results, the brilliance of his novel utterly ineluctable as it sweeps across 1930s Europe from the gulags to the Kremlin, to Paris and to Barcelona.

M/F
By Anthony Burgess
Penguin, £7.99

Miles Faber travels to the Caribbean to survey the forgotten work of a great artist after being expelled from university after a bout of protest sex. Burgess’s dense 1971 novel wastes no time in becoming something mythic and deeply strange. A Greek tragedy via French bedroom farce might be the best way of describing Miles’s attempts to avoid sleeping with his sister, though for a work of such brio, “Burgessian” will suffice.

CHARLIE JOHNSON IN THE FLAMES
By Michael Ignatieff
Vintage, £6.99

In Ignatieff’s brief, bleak polemic, a war correspondent, Charlie, returns to Belgrade to confront a colonel whom he witnessed setting fire to a woman in a Kosovan border town. Charlie and his Polish cameraman have “seen the world together, though they’d seen it too close to know what it really meant”. Charlie’s quest is, it seems, misconceived. As one character says:‘“Why they do it is not an interesting question. What matters is that they do it.”’

MRS SARTORIS
By Elke Schmitter
Faber, £6.99

Margarethe lives in a dull German village shrouded in a drizzling rain of Lancastrian persistence. Having hurriedly taken a husband to spite her first love she has made a peace with mundanity that lasts until, in middle age, an affair with a local arts administrator leads to turmoil and death. Schmitter, via Carol Brown Janeway’s excellent translation, has created a sadistically claustrophobic psychological thriller that often flirts with predictability — only to twist from one’s grasp.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

WHERE I WAS FROM
By Joan Didion
Flamingo, £7.99

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