In This Year It Will Be Different (Orion £17.99) Christmas is the focal point for 20 short stories by Maeve Binchy. Her theme is revelation and change, however small. An acute reader of the human psyche, she homes in on families, the elderly, lovers, couples and the solitary as they prepare for the festivities. Binchy knows her territory and sticks to it. The stories are short, but with her gift for effortless characterisation and homely detail, she evokes the power shifts in families, unwelcome discoveries, conspiracies, affairs, forgiveness, sorrow and the rebirth of optimism with her usual warmth and sympathy.

Jodi Picoult’s novels are highly professional productions. Snappily written and well researched, they frequently pinpoint current moral dilemmas and are carefully crafted to appeal to both men and women.

Second Glance (Hodder £14.99) is no exception. The small Vermont town of Comtosook is experiencing strange, supernatural happenings. Could this be connected to the plan to build a shopping mall over an ancient Indian burial ground? In mourning for his dead fiancée and suicidal, Ross, a ghost hunter, is working on the site and finds himself entangled with an enigmatic woman with a terrible story to tell. The first section of the novel is fractured and overburdened with characters. Persist, and a fascinating mix of eugenics and murder emerges.

Nicci Gerrard, one half of the crime-thriller duo Nicci French, drives deep into emotional terrain in The Moment You Were Gone (Penguin £6.99). The novel interweaves the themes of a long-lived marriage under assault and the fallout after an important friendship has been inexplicably sundered. The two are connected. Faced with evidence of a profoundly destabilising kind, Gaby has to cope with the knowledge that both her husband and her best friend have chosen to deceive her in different ways. Brilliant at fictionalising the inner lives of women, Gerrard knows how to write about the common but never insignificant experiences that can change lives.

In Tell It to the Skies (Orion £14.99) Erica James goes for broke in a story that encompasses child abuse, suicide, religious bigotry and murder. Bought up by their grandparents, Lydia and Valerie endure a damaging childhood. Lydia escapes into her studies and her relationship with Noah, but Valerie is brainwashed by the grandparents’ religious sect. It is only as adults that the sisters are able to talk to each other and understand why they chose such different paths. Despite her subject matter, the author writes with a sturdy, feel-good optimism of difficult childhoods and asserts that love has the power to heal and the past can be laid to rest.

Annabel Dilke’s sharp eye for the absurdities and cruelties of the British class system is evident in A Perfect Revenge (Pocket Books £6.99). Laura Delancey and Joe Trafford have fallen in love – but their families hate each other for reasons that go back a long way. The Delanceys are penniless and the nouveau riche Traffords live in the beautiful Melcombe Abbey. Yet, in the l930s it was the Delanceys who had lived in the abbey and Joe’s grandfather had been their gardener. “If you believe that anger and terror could leave a stain in the air .. . could it not be true of love?” suggests the author as she unpicks the history enshrouding the two families in a beautifully written and subtle story of secrets and lies.

Carol Birch’s Scapegallows (Virago £14.99) invites comparison with Sarah Waters’s novels – but only up to a point, for the author has a first-class voice of her own. An exciting and evocative fictional version of the life of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk woman who was twice condemned to hang and ended up transported to Aus-tralia, her novel is a triumph of texture and historical detail. Margaret was not a woman “for hearth and home with winking china” – partly because of the stuff of which she was made, and partly because she falls in love with Will, a smuggler. Swaggering over the pages, Margaret is a captivating woman, and her love story brings a lump to the throat.

Many struggle and fail to don the mantle of Georgette Heyer. If anyone comes close, it is Jude Morgan whose An Accomplished Woman (Headline £19.99) understands the requirements of a Regency romance. At 30, spinster Lydia Templeton is almost beyond marital redemption. Yet, having rejected Lincolnshire’s most eligible bachelor 10 years previously, she has nobody to blame but herself. Acting as an older chaperone to the beautiful Phoebe, Lydia finds herself in Bath where she struggles to sort out both Phoebe’s romantic entanglements and her own. The author unleashes an engaging sense of the ridiculous in a sprightly and good-humoured love story.

The unexpected death of Belinda Starling, just after she finished writing The Journal of Dora Damage (Bloomsbury £12.99), adds poignancy and real regret to its reading. In 1859, Dora’s husband is incapacitated by arthritis which puts their bookbinding business into jeopardy. What is a woman with a young child and mounting debts to do? If you are Dora the answer is to whip up business by undertaking to bind up pornography for aristocrats, a risky enterprise with attendant dangers. The high-octane energy that drives the writing, and the obvious relish with which the author tackled her subject, shines through.

Alison, the narrator of Mary Gaitskill’s bleak and raw morality tale Veronica (Serpent’s Tale £10.99), is a wreck. A former model, now in her fifties, she is riddled with hepatitis, the face that was once her fortune now “broken with age, pain coming through the cracks”. As she looks back on a career as a dropout in San Francisco, a model in Paris and a friend of Veronica (an eccentric proof-reader who is dying of Aids), she tells a story of exploitation, disappointment, narcissism and self disgust. Yet, such is the power of the writing – poetic, luridly beautiful and shocking – that the bleakness is almost forgotten. It is not easy reading, but it is the work of a powerful, dexterous intelligence.

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