The Secret Life of Bees sold millions of copies worldwide, so Sue Monk Kidd’s second novel, The Mermaid Chair (Headline £14.99) arrives amid huge expectations. Happily married for 22 years, Jessie is summoned from Atlanta to Egret Island where her mother, who cooks for the Benedictine monastery, has deliberately cut off her own finger. As Jessie tries to make sense of this mutilation, she meets Brother Thomas. Several stories jostle for attention — a fraught and complicated love affair and Jessie’s desire to learn the truth about how how her father met his death. The author mixes a cocktail of myth, spiritual concerns and sexual yearning, and her descriptions of the island landscape are lush and detailed, but there is a bigger, richer novel struggling for air here.

Where did it all start, questions Irene as she surveys the devastation of her marriage in Nicci Gerrard’s Solace (Penguin £6.99). The answer lies somewhere between the girl with long golden hair and her metamorphosis into the crop-haired, domestic drudge who has been abandoned by her out-of-work actor husband. Left to cope with three children, Irene has no time for a breakdown — until the children are taken on holiday by their father. The tender and thoughtful portrayal of Irene’s battle to reconstruct her life will strike many chords. Yet, as Solace unfolds, it is clear that its emotional drama also explores the less obvious, but perhaps more telling pathology of a deeper grief.

In Swallowing Grandma (Picador £12.99), Kate Long, who wrote The Bad Mothers’ Handbook, also tackles vexed, thorny and frequently blood-boltered family relationships. Plump and dreaming, 18-year-old Katherine lives with her grandmother, the fearsome Poll. Her father is dead, and her mother, having abandoned her as a baby, is goodness knows where. Money and encouragement are in short supply. In the teeth of Poll’s derision and negativity, Katherine struggles to sort out her weight, sexuality and ambitions. Will she make it to Oxford university? And where is her mother? The plot and its rather awkward framing takes second place to the spark and fizz of the writing. Funny, often touching and honest, the energy and aplomb of the characterisation carry the day.

Many things are left unsaid in Sheena Joughin’s Swimming Underwater (Doubleday £16.99), and the effect is all the more resonant and intriguing. For as long as she can remember, Ruth has been attracted to Gray, the son of her aunt Jane’s lesbian lover Diane. It is a passion that is enduring and unconsummated which, as Ruth’s on-off lover Liam tacitly acknowledges, makes it impossible for Ruth to settle until a cache of letters between Jane and Diane reveals the truth. Writing with superb control, the author uses her pared-to-the-bone prose to steer Ruth from her initial — occasionally puzzling — passivity into the understanding that the sins of the parent do mark the child and that death is neither fair nor discriminating, but yet there is still room to survive.

Kathleen Tessaro’s Innocence (HarperCollins £10) is written with the same cool precision as her bestseller Elegance. Determined to be an actress, Evie flies into London from America to go to drama school. Among others, she meets mercurial Robbie, who has a “talent” for life, and falls for Jake, a blisteringly attractive would-be rock star with sufficient self-destructive urges to fascinate any ingénue. Fifteen years later, Robbie is dead and Evie, a single mother, is teaching drama at night school. Passion and ambition have withered and soured. With her decision to include a ghost, the author veers towards the gothic romance (and Jake is surely a direct descendant of Mr Rochester), but her take on a young girl’s process of maturing through the vicissitudes of love and friendship is edgily up-to-date.

First novels are often a devilish but intriguing mix of burning zeal and, of course, inexperience. So it is with Victoria Hislop’s The Island (Headline £14.99), which is dominated, literally and metaphorically, by the former leper colony at Spinalonga. Lying off the Cretan coast, it was populated only by the victims of the disease, including Alexis’s great-grandmother, Eleni. Anxious to know more about her background, of which she is mainly ignorant, Alexis travels from London to Crete and discovers a family history that includes adultery, murder and leprosy. Passionately engaged with its subject, which gives The Island its buttonholing quality, the author has meticulously researched her fascinating background and medical facts, but the structure and some of the prose are not quite as sure.

It is just as well that Rebecca Wells, the author of the bestselling Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, provides a run-down of the Ya-Ya-cracy on page one of Ya-Yas in Bloom (Harper-Collins £12.99), beginning with the four founder members: Teensy, Vici, Necie and Caro. Next up are their children, the Petite Yas-Yas, followed by the grandchildren, the Trés Petites. Ya-Ya-istas already familiar with the nature and substance of the sisterhood (with its feminine anarchies and solidarities, its Mysteries, and the American Deep South terrain where it flourishes), will no doubt gobble up this third novel, which reprises 60 years of Ya-Ya friendship. The uninitiated, however, might grow impatient with the switchback of voice and stories which cry out for stronger authorial control. This is a curious novel, for the author’s energy has clearly not diminished one whit but the overall im- pression is lacklustre and fatigued. Time to bid farewell to the Ya-Yas?

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