Amulet
by Roberto Bolaño translated by Chris Andrews
Picador, £14.99 £13.49; 184pp

This short, dense, poetic novel aims to encapsulate the violence and tragedy of recent Latin American history in the musings of one woman. Auxilio Lacouture, soi-disant “mother of Mexican poetry”, hides in the ladies’ lavs when the army invades the university campus in 1968. For the next 12 days, while the corpses pile up around her, she muses on her life among the young poets of Mexico City, and her place in the map of Mexican literature. Nothing happens, but everything happens; Bolaño’s prose is spare but beautifully compacted. Other writers love him because he makes writing seem so important.

Small Wars
by Sadie Jones
Chatto & Windus, £12.99 £11.69; 376pp

Jones’s first novel, Outcast, winner of the Costa First Novel Award, was a very hard act to follow. Her second, however, is even better. Set in Cyprus in the emergency of 1956, it shows what history looks like as it is unfolding, and how it affects the people caught up in it. Hal is an ambitious young army officer who is pleased when his family is posted to Cyprus. His wife, Clara, does not like bringing her tiny twins to this dangerous place, but her sense of duty is equally unquestioning, and she knows a good army wife never complains — even when this “small war” threatens her marriage. Jones’s research is impeccable, and her emotional intelligence outstanding.

Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
Bloomsbury, £18.99 £17.09; 349pp

This is so weighed down with praise from other New York scribblers that you start to suspect that the author gives great dinner parties. But this is a wow of a novel — rich, humane, brilliantly written and as deep as it is wide. In August 1974 Philippe Petit, a tightrope artist, walked between the newly built twin towers.

Far below, eight diverse New York characters are among those gazing in wonder. Corrigan is a radical Irish monk. Lara is a druggy artist in a foolish marriage. Claire is a rich housewife. Above them all, the lone figure, and the tiny faces watching him high in the towers, warn of tragedy to come.

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