Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw
Fourth Estate £16.99 pp400
The political convulsions racking mid-1960s Indonesia find a symmetry in the personal upheavals suffered by teenage orphan Adam, whose Edenic island existence is shattered when his Dutch-Indonesian surrogate father, Karl, is marched away by soldiers as the nation tries to purge its colonial legacy. The young hero’s loss reopens old wounds inflicted by his childhood separation from his brother, Johan, who, it transpires, is now a pampered wastrel living in Malaysia. So begin Adam’s paternal and fraternal searches. During the former, he finds a cocktail-swilling angel in Margaret, a Jakarta university lecturer who was Karl’s youthful sweetheart, while in his hunt for Johan he is tempted by the darker ideologies of the Mephistophelian Din, a communist extremist. Though Aw’s sinuous writing vividly brings the turbulent social backdrop to life, he fails to repeat the feat with his protagonists, who grow more remote as the novel unfolds. The further we venture into their inner worlds, the less convincingly the author maps their emotions.

The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels
Bloomsbury £16.99 pp352
Readers familiar with Michaels’s acclaimed debut fiction, the prizewinning Fugitive Pieces, will need no reminder of her remarkable lyrical gifts. While the 12-year hiatus since that first novel has, if anything, heightened her poetic sensibilities, it has also resulted in this conspicuously overwrought meditation on the connectivity of love, war and water. The narrative untangles ­— and that word is not used lightly — the knotty tale of Avery, an engineer whose job it is to relocate the Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel to make way for the Aswan dam, sweeping away communities, histories and memories in the process. A similar fate befalls his marriage to Jean in the wake of a tragedy, and the couple’s lives branch off down separate tributaries. In Canada, the bereft Jean becomes romantically attached to Lucjan, a renegade Polish artist haunted by the Nazis’ decimation of Warsaw, yet the absent Avery still exerts a powerful pull. You don’t have to search very hard in Michaels’s novel to discover her sublimely beautiful images, but they are invariably wrapped around turgid history lessons or lofty humanitarian screeds.

Windows on the Moon by Alan Brownjohn
Black Spring Press £15 pp402
Brownjohn’s assured novel traces the vicissitudes of a small cluster of characters during the grinding austerity of the post-war years. Among these are the Hollards, a lower-middle-class family from the London suburbs, whose stolid patriarch, Perce, has to contend with ambitious office colleagues, while his bookish son, Jack, tries to reconcile his raging teenage hormones with a schoolboy crush on local girl Sylvia. A less harmless tryst is the illicit affair Perce’s wife, Maureen, is having with the owner of a cafe where she works, though she is not the only one acting furtively. Secretive French tutor Pierre-Henri has good reason to be looking over his shoulder as he tries to stay one step ahead of retribution for his past life in the Vichy regime. Though narrow in focus, Brownjohn’s novel is an admirably unvarnished and tenderly crafted vision of a bygone England that is not so much preserved in aspic as marked out by asperity; a world in which everything — be it physical objects or people’s dreams — appears authentically scuffed and worn out.

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