Meet Lem Gulliver, named after the Gulliver of the travels, as he shuttles up and down the Victoria Line in London between the rough comprehensive school where he teaches maths and the parental home where he is a slightly less than welcome lodger. Broadbent explores the trials of masculinity, the tangled skein of her hero’s sexuality and the near impossibility of drumming mathematical theorems into lippy teenagers. Lem’s girlfriend has left him, but his problem relationships are with men. Acutely and wittily observed, this is a serious attempt to articulate the anxieties of the worried young male.

THE DAYS OF ABANDONEMENT
by Elena Ferrante translated by Ann Goldstein
Europa Editions, £7.99

This wild, scary novel begins when Olga’s husband announces that he is leaving. Olga is plunged into such disbelieving grief that her mind unhinges. She is suddenly a vengeful maenad, losing her grip on motherhood while she relives every shady moment of her marriage. The book caused a sensation in Italy, where dumped-lit may be more of a novelty than over here, but you won’t find a more harrowing dissection of the dumped woman. Pay attention, anyone considering a spot of adultery — this is what you’ll be doing to your spouse, and it ain’t pretty.

I HEARD LENIN LAUGH
by Martin Sixsmith
Macmillan, £12.99

As the late Frankie Howerd might have said, nay and thrice nay. This would be all right but for the author’s dreadful decision to write it entirely in the broken English of his Russian narrator. The overall effect is patronising and tiresome. Young Zhenya decides to escape from 1960s Russia when he discovers his true parentage. He ends up in a place called “Vemberley”, in time for the 1966 World Cup. The ending is poignant, but it is hard to care when you have to experience it in what reads like a bad translation.

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