The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Roberts
Serpent's Tail, £10.99 Buy the book here

This delicious second novel came about because the author discovered that the legendary Peggy Guggenheim had spent several unlikely years in rural Sussex. How must she have looked to the locals? The Good Plain Cook of the title is Kitty Allen, who answers an advertisement in 1936 and finds herself in a baffling world of art, poetry, politics and sex. Kitty's employer, Ellen Steinberg, has hit the shires with her unhappy 11-year-old-daughter, and a shaggy lover who spends his days reading Marx. Gorgeously written, full of teasing observations above love, class and cookery.

Trauma by Patrick McGrath
Bloomsbury £15.99 Buy the book here

Charlie Weir is a New York psychiatrist who specialises in the effects of trauma. He works with veterans who have seen unimaginable horrors, but can't deal with certain horrors of his own. A bad professional mistake has driven away his beloved wife and daughter. He can't decide whether he loves or loathes his older brother Walt, a successful painter. Why did their depressive mother always prefer Walt, when Charlie devoted himself to taking care of her? He meets Nora, a beautiful woman, and they embark on a passionate affair, but Nora is a damaged person. Dark, brilliant, unmissable.

Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson
Faber £12.99 Buy the book here

Gerald Samper is a fastidious old fusspot who ghost-writes biographies of sporting celebrities. We meet him just after his Tuscan house has suddenly collapsed. He retreats to Suffolk - and leaves in an unseemly flurry when one of his exotic dishes (vol-au-vents made of minced fieldmouse) causes the death of a dinner guest. Back in Italy, his ruined house has become a place of pilgrimage, apparently because of an apparition of Diana, Princess of Wales. Gerry is inspired to write an opera about the royal icon. A gay garden party of farcical fun and lethal wit.

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