Country of the Grand by Gerard Donovan
Faber, £9.99 Buy the book

Frank, a prosperous Galway solicitor, wakes up one morning with a desire to see the home of his childhood. He finds it horribly changed, and this starts him thinking about his history and the state of his marriage. This is Donovan's title story; a powerful snapshot of a mid-life crisis. All the stories here zoom in on a certain moment that draws everything else into focus. Especially moving is Another Life, in which a childless widow learns that her husband has left her a house she has never heard of. He has led a double life, one that excluded her, and the process of mourning is turned into a search for a man she didn't know.

Harry, Revised by Mark Sarvas
Canongate, £10.99 Buy the book

Harry Rent sits in a café, helplessly in love with a young waitress. He is on his way to his wife's funeral, and he feels awful about his lack of feeling; “the vacuum in his heart where grief and memory and sorrow should be.” But he's no heartless monster. The shock of his wife's death (during cosmetic surgery) has frozen him. So many questions are unanswered - and the truth lies in the unbearable region of Harry's conscience. It's time to untangle the sex and lies. Savras is a wonderfully original writer despite the annoying chapter titles.

The Idea of Love by Louise Dean
Fig Tree, £16.99 Buy the book

Richard is an Englishman, now living in Provence with his French wife and their peculiar 13-year-old son, Max. Dean observes the rootless expat community with an acute, cynical wit. There's something rotten at the heart of Richard's marriage, and his quiet life is upset when he and his expat neighbour visit Africa. He is trying to sell drugs for the treatment of mental illnesses, and is introduced to the notion that mental illness did not exist in Africa before colonisation. This becomes tangled with his ideas about love and before you know it, Rhe has lost wife, home and job. An unforgettable study of the dark side of the mind.

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