Linn Ullmann is the daughter of Liv Ullman and Ingmar Bergman, and the sombre beauty of their films must be written in her genes. Johan, the hero of her third novel, is an unremarkable man. When he hears that he is dying, he looks back at an unremarkable life. His first marriage, to Alice, was miserable. His second, to Mai, is a continual joy — she is the one constant note of grace. It is appropriate, he thinks, that when he can no longer bear living, she should help him to die. It ’s sparsely written and elegantly monochrome.

SWEETNESS IN THE BELLY
by Camilla Gibb
Heinemann £12.99

Lilly encompasses several worlds, and belongs to none. She is a white Muslim convert, working as a nurse and living in a shabby London tower block. After the death of her rootless British parents, Lilly migrated to the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie. She fell for Aziz, a young doctor but they were forced apart by revolution. In London, Lilly surrounds herself with exiled Ethiopians, searching for Aziz and longing for the ancient city of her youth. Camilla Gibb lived in Ethiopia for three years and burrows deep into the lives of her characters, finding the universal in the exotic.

THE TANGO SINGER
by Tomás Eloy Martínez
translated by Anne McLean
Bloomsbury £12.99

Bruno Cadogan is an American academic who travels to Buenos Aires in search of a legendary singer of tangos. Does Julio Martel even exist? He has never been recorded, and nobody knows where he will next decide to air his amazing voice. Bruno is captivated from his first plunge into the chaos of the city, with its echoes of past greatness. This is nothing like the Buenos Aires that he has read about. He wonders why Argentinians like “fantastic” stories, “when reality was so intense, you could feel it burning”. Martel’s singing is less music than literature, less literature than living history. A vivid, fascinating, dreamlike novel.

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