We are in danger of being all Tudored out. Still, there is no denying the era's fascination and, in Amenable Women (Faber £15.99), Mavis Cheek avoids the usual traps into which many novelists fall by adopting a left-of-field take on Henry VIII's marital mayhem. The modern-day protagonist is Flora Chapman - plain, recently widowed and mightily relieved to be so. More out of guilt than any sense of mission, she decides to finish the history of the local village that her handsome, domineering husband had been labouring over before his freak death, and finds herself taking up cudgels on behalf of the traduced Anne of Cleves, who once lived there. Flora's researches take her to the Louvre and the famous Holbein portrait of Anne of Cleves, which, bizarrely, starts to talk to her, embarking on a spirited defence of her time as “sister” to the monster king - and a very congenial and successful life it turns out to have been, filled with music, good food and friendships. Nobody can fail to warm to Cheek's shrewd and attractive version of Anne of Cleves, a princess who perfected the art of making a virtue out of necessity. This is a clever piece of historical revisionism, enlivened by the book's other portrait, of an underestimated, middle-aged woman crawling out from under the marital millstone.

There is a touch of de haut en bas discernible in Alison Weir's The Lady Elizabeth (Hutchinson £12.99), in which the author declares: “For dramatic purposes, I have woven into my story a tale that goes against all my instincts as a historian!” Shades of Weir, the magisterial and clean-living academic, dipping a dainty toe into murky fictional waters? There can be little of Elizabeth's political, private or sexual life that has escaped scrutiny, and one of the more lurid speculations about her fuels the drama of this brisk, slightly underwhelming trot through her precarious upbringing and much-debated relationship with Thomas Seymour, her stepmother's husband. Some will look to this novel for its historical authenticity as well as the story - and the challenge is to work out which is which. It is when it comes to the overall judgment on the fiction that the reader runs into a problem. If the author does not believe passionately in her creation, then why should we willingly suspend our disbelief?

As wicked and dangerous as ever, Anne Fine is on sparkling form with Fly in the Ointment (Bantam Press £16.99). Abandoned by an indifferent husband, her only son lost to drugs, Lois finds her “iced-up” heart melting when she is confronted by the spectacle of her neglected baby grandson. Living with the daily reminder of her own disastrous mothering skills, she seizes the chance to make amends. Forced into a series of lies and deceptions, she takes to them with the masochist determination of the penitent and, later, of the messianic convert. “You tell me what you'd have done. You be the judge,” she challenges the reader, knowing perfectly well that we will end up rooting for her. Morality shmorality, suggests the author, calculating that, when it comes to protecting a child in danger, a predicament that triggers in most of us the most primal of responses, we can be manipulated into agreeing that wrong is right. Deploying both wit and daring, Fine pokes away at the cracks in our moral compass with the sharpest of pens.

In yet another of her challenging and excellent novels, Rachel Billington tackles the muddles and complications of family. “What did Imogen do?” Portia asks about her dying mother in Lies and Loyalties (Orion £18.99). The answer is not much - a spot of modelling, some desultory charity work - yet her culpability is huge. A monstrously cold, selfish beauty, Imogen is responsible for the unhappiness and dysfunction of her five children, one of whom she gave away. Despite their ages and achievements, all are bewildered, angry and fearful. As one of their spouses points out, “We are not born to be happy.” The staccato structure takes a little getting used to, but the unshowy prose provides a base for a grown-up story seasoned with politics, religion and the terrors of breakdown.

In Charlotte Moore's Grandmother's Footsteps (Viking £17.99), his Honour Judge Simeon Oakes is dead, and the women left behind have to make crucial decisions, not least about the fate of Knighton, the family's beautiful old house and garden. The story is told from three points of view - that of feminist grandmother Evelyn, downtrodden passive- aggressive daughter Verity, and successful but troubled granddaughter Hester. None of their marriages is successful, their men are damaged, adulterous or slick, Knighton holds many secrets and the happiness of all three women has been compromised. The plot hangs on some old-fashioned contrivances (the discovery of a diary, the existence of an unknown relation) but the book is none the worse for it. Filled with quiet pleasures, quirky in places, this is not a barnstormer of a novel but one with integrity.

The sins of the father are mercilessly exposed in Lily Dunn's impressive, fluently written and confident first novel, Shadowing the Sun (Portobello £10.99). As a pretty 12-year-old, Sylvie travelled to Florence with her brother to join their hippie father in a commune for the summer. Now a haunted 29-year-old, she is getting ready to meet him in London to ask him to give her away at her wedding. What happened to render her so vulnerable and damaged? The answer is an all-too-familiar litany of experiments in parenting, drugged and careless adults, the abolition of rules and no care for a child's needs. The betrayal of the young Sylvie, teetering between innocence and knowledge, desperate to trust the one person who fails her, is brutal and shocking.

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