Skilful execution and cool readability – these qualities are to be expected in an Anita Shreve novel. Body Surfing (Little, Brown £14.99) is no exception. The setting is the house on the New Hampshire coast that has featured in previous novels, including Fortune’s Rocks, and is now owned by the Edwards family. Twice-married Sydney is hired as a summer tutor to their beautiful but “slow” daughter, Julie, little knowing that the Edwards’ sons, Ben and Jeff, are conducting a covert sibling war. Attractive and slightly lost since the death of her second husband, Sydney blunders into a situation she does not understand. Body Surfing is Shreve’s 13th novel, and, as this classy family drama displays, she is now highly skilled at paring the ingredients of her fiction to the bone. On the downside, the staccato rhythms and ultra-spare prose are occasionally achieved at the expense of our empathy. The reader is made to work hard (no harm in that). But, if you like your fiction as seductively spare and bleached as its setting, this will please.

Sibling rivalry also puts the flesh on the plot of Libby Purves’s Long Songs and Lies (Hodder £14.99), whose lusher, more lax take on brothers at war could not provide a greater contrast. In Oxford in the 1970s, undergraduates Kate, Marienko, Max and Sally are renting a house by the canal. From this group, a future history of love affairs, unrequited passion, sex, marriage and a premature death will develop. Narrated by Sally (virginal, unashamedly romantic and with a talent for rock-song lyrics), the story spans 20 years and a complicated sentimental education. This is an unashamedly old-fashioned, emotional roller-coaster of a novel written in highly wrought prose, yet leisurely and reflective in manner. And Purves, as she teases out the consequences of familial secrets and lies, is not afraid to act as a gentle moralist.

Sue Gee’s many fans will fall on Reading in Bed (Headline Review £18.99). Dido and Georgia, affectionate friends since university, have made the most of their busy, fulfilled lives. Now, the comfortable, civilised times appear to be coming to an end and mortality is making itself felt. Recently widowed, Georgia is struggling back to normality and frets over her daughter, lovelorn Chloë. Up north, Dido is having blackouts, and something that she senses is serious is troubling her husband, Jeffrey. Is he having an affair? Is his job at stake? Into the small, everyday scenarios that face all of us the author infiltrates a meditation on the big questions about death and its aftermath, trust, bereavement, love and the corrosive effects of disappointment. Giving great vividness to their inner lives, Gee unerringly and confidently evokes her characters.

The recent disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal endows Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless (Little, Brown £12.99) with a troubling relevance. Beautiful nine-year-old Rachel is abducted during a blackout by Ron, a small-appliance repair man who has prepared a room in the basement of his house fit for a princess. Aided by Nancy, his drug-addict girlfriend, Ron settles down to woo Rachel into acquiescence and – even – into loving him. Meanwhile, Celia, Rachel’s struggling, somewhat feckless musician single mother, suffers extreme torment in which guilt plays a part. Gowdy, who has been longlisted for the Man Booker in the past, is typically bold in her approach to a ferociously difficult subject, and there is no doubt that Helpless will provoke strong reaction. Ron and his desires are analysed with great clarity and in a manner that contains sympathy. Quite properly, Gowdy suggests nothing is simple, and that understanding and forgiveness must not be discarded even in the face of so great a transgression. This is surely right, but Ron is hard to stomach.

Ramika Vasi’s predicament in Nikita Lalwani’s debut novel, Gifted (Viking £16.99), is a tough one. Marked out by the age of 10 as a maths prodigy, Rami is driven by her father, a maths professor, to achieve Oxford entrance by the age of 15. The troubled teenager is subjected to a gruelling work programme against which, understandably, she rebels. Add to this the inevitable cultural tensions in a family that is struggling to put down roots in this country, and the pressures mount. The author conveys the confusions of Rami’s developing body and mind with charm and warmth, includes some interesting set pieces, such as Rami’s first visit to relatives in India, and pinpoints with genuine insight the bewilderment and anguish of a young woman marked out from her peers.

The copy line for Charlotte Bingham’s The White Marriage (Bantam Press £12.99) declares it to be a story of love and betrayal set in an age of innocence. Certainly, the sexual ignorance and rigid social standards that existed in postwar austerity Britain are crucial to the plot, in which two older lovers scheme to entice a younger woman into a white marriage in order to further their own ends. Thus, the innocent and beautiful Sunny finds herself engaged to Gray (the archetypal handsome playboy whose fortune cannot be realised until he marries), little knowing that Leandra, his beautiful mistress, is masterminding the whole thing. As with Georgette Heyer, whose spirit hovers over the book, once the ridiculousness of the situation is accepted, the reader can settle down to a galloping read that chronicles a previous generation’s sexual antics. Writing with evident enjoyment, Bingham relishes her period detail and social comedy and adds an appealing touch of whimsy.

Buy the books here

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy