The Girl Who Was Going to Die by Glyn Maxwell
Jonathan Cape, £12.99

A terrorist attack on a London film set has killed 100 people, and the nation is crazed with grief. A photographer happens upon a beautiful woman weeping on a public bench, and she becomes the iconic image of Britain in mourning. She is weeping about something quite different, however — a fortune-teller has told her that she is about to die. A satire about the media and its power to corrupt written as a cross between a movie-script and a novel. Bang up to date and blackly funny, with a dash of poetry thrown in.

The Outcast by Sadie Jones
Chatto & Windus, £12.99

Someone on the back compares this novel to Atonement — steady on, it’s not quite in that bracket, though the settings are similar. In 1957, young Lewis Aldridge comes out of prison after two years. He finds his home eerily unchanged, but there are terrible secrets seething beneath the good manners. Scroll back ten years, and Gilbert, the father of Lewis, returns from the war. Outwardly, he fits neatly back into his middle-class life, but nothing is at it seems. The boy’s world falls apart when his mother dies in mysterious circumstances. Can his friend, Kit, save him without blowing her own family apart? Beautifully written, if somewhat doomy and overwrought.

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