The China Lover by Ian Buruma
Atlantic £15.99 pp320
A beautiful Japanese actress (known variously as Ri Koran when she is working for the war effort in Manchuria, as Yoshiko Yamaguchi in Japan and as Shirley Yamaguchi in Hollywood) is observed by three men. Sato Daisuke is a cultural official with a taste for Manchuria's cosmopolitan night life. Sidney Vanovens is an American cinephile who plunges into post-war Tokyo's gay sexual underworld, while the virulently anti-western Sato Kenkichi becomes caught up in the Palestinian struggle. Ri's shape- shifting career could be said to mirror Japan's struggle to emerge into the modern world, and each man connects with her on a different level. This fascinatingly knowledgeable novel reveals a penchant for idiosyncratic character and detail, but is let down by its curiously remote heroine.

Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes
Weidenfeld £17.99 pp416
Damien Baxter, a dying multimillionaire, summons a long-estranged friend to his Surrey pile to ask for his help in tracking down his heir, conceived when they were both young men about town in the 1960s and doing the season. Thus, the narrator (who is never named) is launched into a journey into the past. How maddening is this novel? It arrives equipped with two central puzzles, each sufficient to keep one hoovering up the pages. Yet instead of being allowed to settle into a rather gripping story, the reader is buttonholed by digressions on obsolete mores and class nuances. No doubt this would be fascinating in a sociology treatise, but as a novel it requires a red pencil. A sometimes poignant, sometimes rueful elegy to the era when AA men saluted you? Yes. A la recherche du temps perdu? Non.

La's Orchestra Saves the World by by Alexander McCall Smith
Polygon £14.99 pp250
With a failed marriage behind her, La moves to the Suffolk countryside on the eve of the second world war. Lonely and at a loss, she works on a nearby farm and, with the help of an RAF friend, starts up a local orchestra. Here she meets Feliks, an enigmatic Polish former fighter pilot, and discovers that her crushed feelings are stirring back into life. The author writes about the enduring, patient qualities of love rather than about its froth, and his heroine strives to achieve some kind of moral stance and meaning as the world implodes. Lightly (although not in the least insubstantially) confected, the novel pays heed to our natural yearning for a story to chew on and for a resolution that is uplifting without being saccharine.

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