The Hartlepool Monkey by Sean Longley
Doubleday, £14.99

According to legend, in the Napoleonic wars the people of Hartlepool hanged a monkey as a French spy. This imaginative first novel tells his story. Simon Legris, a Paris physician, goes to Africa and meets a remarkable monkey. Jacques can understand human speech, and becomes Simon's devoted servant. After many adventures, he ends up in the Hartlepool dock. It's up to one Warrens, a lowly “one- guinea brief”, to defend him. The tone is comic and irreverent, but big questions are posed about the nature of man and the freedom of the individual. The author works as a modern brief, “defending the unglamorous” of South London. How can any jury resist him?

Submarine by Joe Dunthorne
Hamish Hamilton, £15.99

Oliver Tate is about to turn 15, and considers himself a great judge of character. By watching his neighbours in Swansea, he deduces that one neighbour is “pansexual” (attracted to absolutely everything). He is sure his parents are hiding something, and applies Sherlock Holmes's methods to penetrate their secrets. At school, he writes a pamphlet for a bullied fat girl, entitled “How to Fit in with People You Don't Like Even When You are an Endomorph”. This is a brilliant first novel, by a young man of ferocious comic talent - Oliver is the finest teenage narrator since Adrian Mole.

Repatriated by Adriaan Van Dis, translated by David Colmer
Heinemann, £12.99

The boy is an outsider in his own family. His father, Mr Java, is a ruined, war-damaged ex- colonial, living on the Dutch coast. Mr Java's wife and her three daughters (from a previous marriage in Indonesia) use the boy to bear the worst of his father's moods. “Only the weak get homesick,” is Mr Java's mantra, but he is pining for his old country and old life, and in the shadow of the Cold War his terror of the future eats away at his sanity. The boy knows he must escape his background before it swallows him. Van Dis cleverly walks the line between tragedy and farce.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist