The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills
While those who commute daily by bus hardly need reminding of the vagaries of travel timetables, which appear to run according to the principle of feast or famine, jaded passengers will find plenty to amuse them in Mills’s appealingly absurd novella. Set in the self-contained world of bus drivers — a job the author knows first-hand — it observes their route-related dramas and eavesdrops on their conversations, most tellingly those with the jobsworth transport inspectors. There is an air of Pinter to these clipped, oblique and faintly intimidating exchanges (“There’s no excuse for being early”), whose thinly veiled verbal power games are often forcibly diverted back to the inspectors’ almost Kafkaesque idea of “maintenance of headway” — an inviolable rule that requires buses to stay set distances and intervals apart. Mills’s slight book will not suit all tastes (if you’re looking for its plot, the best bet may be to try lost property), but whereas you can wait ages for a bus and three arrive at once, there could be some delay before such an original work of fiction comes along again (Bloomsbury £10 pp152).

The Wonder by Diana Evans
Antoney Matheus, Evans’s larger-than-life creation, is a brilliant Jamaican dancer who set London abuzz in the 1960s, forming his own troupe, the fictional Midnight Ballet, which dazzled critics and audiences alike. There are intimations of the tragic Russian maestro Nijinsky, however, about the black prodigy, whose genius as a performer masks inner conflicts. Sure enough, the pressures of fame, professional fallouts and artistic demands take their toll on his personal relationships, and his private life comes tumbling down around him. Years after the troubled star vanishes from the limelight, we find his shiftless son, Lucas, trying — not totally convincingly — to piece together his father’s past. Evans, a former dancer herself, writes with eye-catching fluidity, gracefully pirouetting between Notting Hill in the 1990s and 1960s, and the Caribbean a decade earlier. Despite the author’s skilful narrative choreography, though, she struggles to bring depth or focus to Lucas’s character, and consequently long stretches of the book’s modern sections look flat-footed compared with the more limber flashbacks (Chatto £12.99 pp314).

A Winding Road by Jonathan Tulloch
The vulnerabilities of art (its susceptibility to manipulation or misappropriation) and its strengths (its power to regenerate) are the overarching themes of Tulloch’s bold, if flawed novel, which interlinks an unlikely cast over three centuries. At one end of its time line, we encounter the dying Vincent Van Gogh, an abject figure feverishly painting his last masterpiece, while at the other end is Piers Guest, a London art pundit with a celebrity coterie, swanky offices and threadbare morals. Bisecting the two is Ernst Mann, a German folklore expert, who first has his work twisted into racist propaganda by the Nazis, then later, after he joins the SS, his soul. Although the book’s surface-versus-reality symbolism can be heavy-handed and its narrative connections forced, the author’s attention to character and detail means the protagonists and their milieux are brought vibrantly to life. This is arguably Tulloch’s most ambitious novel to date, and a measure of the distance he has come as a writer; but it is certainly not the finished article, and a gauge of how far he still has to go (Cape £17.99 pp327).

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