THE TOWN THAT FORGOT HOW TO BREATHE
BY KENNETH J. HARVEY
Vintage, £7.99

Harvey’s original and ambitious tale concerns the residents of Bareneed, a small Newfoundland outpost whose inhabitants are succumbing to an inexplicable respiratory disease. Father and daughter holidaymakers Joseph and Robin hear strange noises coming from their barn, a little girl seems to be waving from an upstairs window in a house without children, and the sea is beginning to churn up all manner of oddities, including malignant red fish. Whether you accept Harvey’s far-out explanation for all this is a matter for individual taste, but the quality of his storytelling and his way with an eerie instant are too good to miss.

IN THE NAME OF ISHMAEL
BY GIUSEPPE GENNA
Atlantic, £7.99

Divided between two homicide investigations undertaken by young Milanese police detectives, one in 1962 and the other in 2001, Genna’s debut embarks on a superbly paranoid journey into geopolitical conspiracy. I won’t reveal exactly who or what Ishmael is, but the process of finding its true nature involves political killings, the EU, a paedophile ring, S&M sex parties and seemingly Satanic rites. Genna’s prose, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, adds to the weirdness by lurching between Chandleresque terseness and Baudrillardian impenetrability, while his twitchy tale lends a dark alternative significance to the recent EU “no” votes.

MR PARADISE
BY ELMORE LEONARD
Pan, £7.99

In 1985 Elmore Leonard revealed one of the reasons for his success: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip,” he told Publisher’s Weekly. Twenty years and 14 books later and one would struggle to find an ounce of fat on Mr Paradise, which, typically of Leonard, lays more or less everything out on a plate, but still leaves the reader desperate to learn how things will turn out. A double homicide pulls the smouldering Detroit detective Frank Delsa into the orbit of a possibly manipulative model, a scheming attorney and three of “America’s dumbest criminals”. Crime fiction nirvana from the master craftsman.

THE GLORIOUS FLIGHT OF THE PERDITA TREE
BY OLIVIA FANE
Maia, £8.99

Perdita Tree, a Tory wife, is quite as desperately bored as she is devastatingly attractive. Always up for a change from the old routine, when she is kidnapped by the English prep-school educated Anglophilic Albanian Alfred she decides to do her best to see it as an adventure. Back in England (in 1991, mind, when the Tories were still a political party), her husband Nicholas is squiring his mistress and doing his best to parlay Perdita’s kidnapping into political capital. Fane toys with chick-lit conventions, but consistently focuses her smart, fluid prose and sophisticated thought on rendering a thoughtful, sorrowful and often highly amusing novel.

STILLRIVER
BY ANDREW ROSENHEIM
Arrow, £6.99

Familiarity abounds throughout Rosenheim’s debut, a Midwestern smalltown tale that incorporates high-school romance, midlife crisis and a murder mystery. A bisexual, Michael Wolf, returns to Stillriver after his father’s murder, and pursues his own investigation into the killing while attempting a rapprochement with his childhood sweetheart, Cassie. Rosenheim writes well enough, but his reliance on well-used narrative convention sometimes comes to grate over 500 pages. Michael’s noting of a dilapidated dam and a vulnerable bridge down-river echoes with the unmistakable sound of a box marked “denouement” being ticked.

Page 2: Non-fiction by Iain Finlayson

SOLO
BY PEN HADOW
Penguin, £7.99

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