"Guess what she’s done now… Just guess! The bitch!” The opening paragraph of Anne Fine’s Our Precious Lulu (Bantam Press £16.99) says it all. With a kindly husband, Robert, a nice home, a cat and a good job, Geraldine has everything — except a baby. Her stepsister Lulu, beautiful and feckless with unsuitable boyfriends and no career, has always undermined Geraldine. She has now done the one thing designed to push Geraldine over the edge: she has “got herself pregnant”.

The seething resentment in this slight novel about sisterly jealousy begins at page one and continues to the bitter end. There is a faint air of menace, as if some sinister plot twist is lurking, but nothing shocking materialises. What you see is what you get: petty machinations, jealousy and recrimination. Fine writes in dignified and clear prose that does ring true — families are often boring, self-obsessed and small-minded; couples really do talk about the same thing over and over again. Robert is desperate to emigrate to Australia and put the whole sorry family mess behind him. One can only sympathise.

Like Fine, Ursula Le Guin ex-plores family politics in Lavinia (Gollancz £14.99). But while Fine focuses inwards, Le Guin strikes out — ranging through historical, political and spiritual arenas, across centuries, through dreams and poems and geographical fact. It is all extremely stimulating.

Le Guin is a composed writer, clear and measured, and her account of the life of Aeneas’s last wife, a woman Virgil scoots over in the The Aeneid, is captivating. Lavinia is the daughter of peace-loving Latinus, the ruler of Laurentum. Assertive but gentle, she is an appealing voice of reason despite having been consistently abused by her deranged mother, Amata. Now in her 19th year, Lavinia is inundated with suitors, one of whom is her cousin Turnus, her mother’s top choice.

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Lavinia, however, heads off to some sacred springs where she meets the ghost of the unborn poet who tells her she is to marry Aeneas. When the rugged warrior finally shows up, hot from bloody battles, an African queen and a long sea voyage, Lavinia is adamant that he’s The One. War erupts. Locals are slaughtered, the bloodthirsty, yet civilised Aeneas triumphs and Lavinia gets her hero. This is a work of passion, written with cool expertise: a cracker.

Roma Tearne also explores politics, families and war, though with less dramatic results. Brixton Beach (HarperPress £14.99) begins boldly, in the immediate aftermath of the 7/7 London suicide bombings in 2005. We then move back 30 years to Sri Lanka’s escalating civil war and a family saga of loss and exile. Eight-year-old Alice has a Singhalese mother and a Tamil father. She learns the hard way what this really means when her sister dies at birth thanks to the deliberate neglect of the presiding Singhalese doctor. Her broken mother never really recovers, and Alice finds herself in dreary London, growing up to feel as trapped and unhappy as her mother. Tearne, whose parents fled Sri Lanka for Britain when she was 10 years old, is a thoughtful writer, but there is something slightly muted about this book, as if someone has dimmed the lights a touch.

Nobody could accuse Stephanie Theobald of dimming any lights in A Partial Indulgence (Sceptre £11.99), which is billed loudly as “a novel about art, sex and money”. The sex is decidedly unsexy (it tends to involve rotting animal ­carcasses or occasional bondage scenarios), but art and money are everywhere. Charles Frederick de Vere, a sleazy art dealer, picks up a leggy Yank, Carmen Costella, at Claridge’s, where she is chambermaiding, and makes her his helpmeet. Their lives also intersect with that of Cosima, an aristocratic artist who lives in a crumbling country pile. The plot is surreal (like an episode of the 1980s television series Dallas as imagined by Salvador Dali) and it is hard to pinpoint what, precisely, Theobald is saying about life. That money warps? The final plot twist announces itself as flamboyantly as a drag queen in a spangly dress, but you have to admire Theobald’s chutzpah.

You Don’t Have To Be Good by Sabrina Broadbent (Chatto £12.99) lies at the other end of the glamour spectrum. Set in boring old ­middle-class Cambridge, it is the story of a disappearing middle-aged woman called Bea. Taken for granted by a selfish sister and a useless husband, Bea seems to fade into the background. Then one day she vanishes. Now her shocked loved ones realise how germane she is to their world, and start to fall apart.

At first, this novel looks like it is going to be a bore, but then it becomes compelling. Broadbent, a clever and subtle writer, is saying something unfashionably vital (and rarely articulated) about the lot of the childless menopausal woman. Bea is absent for most of the book but remains the vivid linch-pin, a touching, three-dimensional presence. As the missing-persons ­experts put it, “people only start looking once they’ve already gone”.

In contrast, there is something almost toe-curlingly self-indulgent about William Nicholson’s The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (Quercus £16.99). Nicholson, a screenwriter with credits that include Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Gladiator, writes suave prose, but this novel, set in an East Sussex village called Edenfield, drips with middle-class angst to the point at which you just want to firebomb the lot of them. This, of course, is probably his point: we are never satisfied with the joys we have.

The central couple, Henry and Laura, love each other, their children are privately educated, they live in a big farmhouse and hang out at Glyndebourne. But Henry’s job as a film director fails to satisfy his creative urges, and Laura, 20 years on, hankers after her first love at university. The narrative swings through the perspectives of various locals, too. Some are nicer than others, but what oozes, ultimately, from this over-privileged corner of Britain is frustration: the rot beneath the Boden-catalogue smiles. No wonder the local farmer keeps reaching for his shotgun.

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