ABSURDISTAN by Gary Shteyngart

Mischa Vainberg is the obese, track-suited, gangsta-rapping, burger-stuffing grotesque at the centre of this savagely comic indictment of modern Russia. Mischa loves America and his south Bronx girlfriend, but he has visa problems because his father murdered an Oklahoma businessman; fortunately, help is at hand in the postSoviet republic of Absurdsvani, where he chases a black-market Belgian passport. Shteyngart’s energetically crazed novel skewers cowboy capitalism, multiculturalism, globalisation, Russian orphans and even the Holocaust museum, and it is strikingly written, with a luscious but ultimately nauseating finesse. It is not a book to read for the plot so much as for the cornucopia of nightmarish detail that spills out of it like shiny rubbish.

(Granta £7.99)

WHEN TO WALK by Rebecca Gowers

Being described as an “autistic vampire” is a pretty unusual insult, but then again Gowers’s protagonist, Ramble, is no run-of-the-mill heroine. Living up to her name in her rambling narration, she is an aurally impaired, gammy-legged travel writer whose wanderlust stretches as far as the local library, but is a veritable Bruce Chatwin when it comes to mental peregrinations. The only person packing his bags here, however, is Ramble’s husband, whose desertion of her is the prologue to what looks like the week from hell. Thereafter, Ramble seeks solace with a larger-than-life ensemble of nononsense neighbours, accommodating gays and senile relatives, but is never happier than when tracking down lexical puzzlers, unearthing arcane nuggets of knowledge or foisting her pedantry on us. Despite an uncontrollable urge to slap or, at times, strangle this 24-carat oddball, her crackpot musings steadily grow on the reader – or at least add to the novel’s curiosity value.

(Canongate £7.99)

THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST by Richard Flanagan

Gina Davies, aka “the Doll”, is a pole dancer in a King’s Cross club. After a one-night stand with a man named Tariq, she finds herself a suspect in a foiled terrorist plot to bomb the Olympic stadium in Sydney. Scapegoated and vilified by the press and television, she is forced to go on the run. The stripper is stripped of everything she possesses and everything she believes as she is swiftly transformed into a sacrifice to the tabloid gods. Half political thriller and half an angry polemic in which Flanagan hits out at the poisonous simplicities of the media and the scaremongering that accompanies the war on terror, this is not a subtle novel but it is a powerful one.

(Atlantic £7.99)

MEASURING TIME by Helon Habila

Africa’s legacy of colonialism, the bonds of fraternity and the long shadow cast by an absent father are among the themes explored in Habila’s rewarding novel, which follows the lives of twin brothers in Nigeria’s hinterlands. Having lost their mother and been further wounded by their father’s neglect, the fragile and anaemic Mamo and his heartier sibling, LaMomo, try to escape the confines of village life. Mamo’s ill-health thwarts his bid for freedom, seemingly condemning him to an ineffectual future in his small community, until his literary skills earn him the patronage of a powerful man. Meanwhile, LaMomo is sucked into the continent’s never-ending cycle of bloody wars, which consumes many years before he finds his way back to his brother. Habila’s writing sometimes lacks lustre, but his wit, poignancy and gripping storytelling place this novel among the finest works of Nigerian fiction in recent years.

(Penguin £7.99)

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