The follow-up to Fleishman Is in Trouble explores the fallout from a kidnapping in a rich American family

‘Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” The first line of Long Island Compromise sets the tone: a self-aware narrator commanding our attention. It’s an instant connection, which shouldn’t be a surprise because this is New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose intelligent and supremely engaging debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble , was an international hit and became a Disney+ TV series . Second books can be fatal, of course, and clearly Brodesser-Akner has decided to go big with a novel about that curse of contemporary America – serious wealth. Apple TV+ has already bought the rights.

The story kicks off in 1980 with a kidnapping. Super-rich polystyrene foam factory owner Carl Fletcher is swiped from the driveway of his enormous Long Island waterfront home, where his pregnant wife, Ruth, is giving their two sons, Nathan, eight, and “Beamer”, six, bowls of cereal. It is a brilliantly orchestrated opening, 30 pages of calmly narrated shock, chaos and panic – the $250,000 demand, the FBI, the media, the reaction of the wider community, women in avocado- and mustard-coloured kitchens gossiping down phone lines. Pregnant Ruth, sobbing hysterically, ends up dropping the ransom money in an airport bin, accompanied – unfathomably – by little Beamer, the child frozen in terror. Carl is returned battered and traumatised. He’ll never recover. The rest of the novel documents the shattering emotional fallout.

A young female writer is drawn into the family of a revered novelist and patriarch, in this powerfully compelling dissection of the creative process

A sultry August in Sicily in 1999 provides the initial setting for Marina Kemp’s powerfully compelling second novel. The court of the revered novelist and patriarch Don Travers – his four children; his silent, apparently surrendered wife Lydia; and a revolving guestlist of the great and good, the influential, the useful and the up-and-coming – is in situ at Il Frantoio, the rambling villa the family takes every summer.

At 10 years old, the youngest Travers daughter, Nemony – feeling left out, as youngest children often do – is our first and principal narrator. The second is a young writer, Zoe Goodison, whose first novel has recently been published to high praise. She has been brought into Il Frantoio’s charmed circle by Don, whose interest in her may or may not be sexual. Zoe is alienated from her background, in a toxic relationship, ill-at-ease, prickly, proud and insomniac. Like Nemony, she inhabits the storyteller’s position on the edge of things.

The Czech writer didn’t only leave us The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he wrote a series of playful, philosophical books examining relationships, sex and mortality

That people love to ask novelists to name their favourite novel has always struck me as odd – a bit like asking a passionate traveller to pick a single favourite destination or an accomplished gardener just one flower. Still, the question is inescapable. And so, some time ago, I decided to answer it early and often, flashing a convincing smile while reciting, “My favourite book is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” It is true: Almost everything that I love and have ever loved about reading can be found within the pages of the English translation of Milan Kundera’s greatest hit, first published 40 years ago. But it’s a trick answer. I love too many novels too much to have a favourite.

What I really mean is that of all the things that a novelist can do – of all the games it can play, all the truths it can seek, all the depths it can plumb, all the jokes it can crack — this novel does all the things I love most: examining human relationships, braiding humour into philosophy, turning prose into poetry. If you love these things too, here’s a guide to the work of the late Czech author.

A Franz Kafka scholar’s perceptive annotation and translation highlights every subtle shade of humour and brilliant aphorism in these singular tales

In the case, the singular case, of Franz Kafka, the law of diminishing returns might be applied in an adapted form: the more diminished the text, the richer the return. He was a master of the fragment, and an aphorist every bit as great as Nietzsche or Rochefoucauld. Consider these few examples. “A cage went in search of a bird.” “I feel like a Chinaman going home; but then, I am a Chinaman going home.” “There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.” “In your struggle with the world, hold the world’s coat.” And then there is that famous, and famously sly, response he gave to his friend Max Brod who had asked if there was any hope to be had in the world: “Plenty of hope – for God – no end of hope – only not for us.”

In this splendid new selection from Kafka’s fiction – though Kafka’s fiction calls for some other, unique designation – Mark Harman, professor emeritus of German and English at Elizabethtown College in the US, begins with two fragments, Wish to Become an Indian and The Trees, which might be epigraphs written specially by Kafka himself.

A bullying brother’s death is the spur for an extraordinary and chilling portrait of sibling enmity in the second novel by the author of little scratch

Not to bang on about Granta’s latest once-a-decade list of best young British novelists – old news more than a year after its announcement – but where was Rebecca Watson ? In the issue of the magazine that showcased the 20 under-40 writers chosen, she wasn’t even mentioned in an editorial introduction bravely sifting the many authors who nearly made the cut. Who knows – de gustibus and all that – but I reckon her typographically disruptive debut little scratch (2021) should have made it blindingly obvious that here was a one-of-a-kind storyteller gifted with a winningly refreshing mix of traits: unorthodox in form yet compulsively readable, playful and mischievous in spirit while seriously thoughtful in exploring her central theme of what trauma does to a mind and body.

I Will Crash , her second novel, is even better. Like little scratch , which followed an unnamed office worker who has been raped by her boss, it’s a tale of aftermath; the narrator, Rosa, a journalist who helps out three days a week with literacy provision at a school, is nearing 30 when she gets a call saying her estranged older brother has just fatally crashed his car. The news is tough, but not for the obvious reason: growing up, he physically and psychologically tormented Rosa in a years-long exercise of power that still defies articulation, not least for their mother, who continues to write it off as child’s play rather than bullying.

Where Watson’s debut gave us a single day in its protagonist’s life, this book gives us five, from the Wednesday that Rosa first receives the news of her brother (never named) to the Sunday when she visits the grieving girlfriend whose existence she’s only just discovered. As in little scratch , snipped-up sentences skitter across the page, conveying the simultaneity of consciousness in a swirl of thoughts, conversations, texts and memories nested inside other memories. Rosa isn’t yet 10 when she learns that to play a game of Connect 4 with her brother is to tread on eggshells – better lose than risk his sulk – and before long he’s pinching her ankles, spitting in her eyes, putting raw bacon on her pillow, silently mouthing “fatso” after their mother’s second husband wonders whether, at 14, she should lose weight.

Darker deeds are glimpsed – part of the story turns on what happened when Rosa’s brother and a classmate got together – but what I Will Crash dramatises with horrible perfection is the enduring derangement of not being believed, even by yourself, in the wake of prolonged exposure to such intimate and sly hostility in the supposedly safe space of childhood. Rosa is fully aware that her ordeal is “not much of a story / more, a lingering sensation”; she knows, too, that even to recount it now is to risk bathos or indifference (“waving slices of bacon / in the face of death / never enough”). It doesn’t help her to remember that she once scarred her brother’s face with a lighter – a moment of pent-up retaliation whose consequences remain unforgivingly visible next to her own unseen hurt. Nor that, shortly before his death (a suicide, she suspects) he had turned up out of the blue at her door after six years incommunicado, only for Rosa to send him away.

The superlative economy of Watson’s narrative style – all those glancing fragments – lets her keep the action claustrophobically internal while ushering into view an impressively broad sweep of external miseries, from Rosa’s boyfriend’s own family trouble to the regrets of a random drinker encountered over a consolatory solo pint. There’s plenty of observational charm in Watson’s eye for, say, the wobbly mechanics of fixing a post-pub slice of toast, or the delicate etiquette of untangling your limbs from your partner’s while drifting off to sleep. But where little scratch was a novel about joy in the face of pain, this is a book inescapably about pain followed by more pain; shelve it with Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms as a decades-spanning family saga told in extraordinary microcosm, another chilling portrait of household dynamics gone poisonously awry and the nigh-on impossibility of redress.

This remarkable debut novel explores the Netherlands’ failure to reckon with the fate of Dutch Jews alongside one woman’s reckoning with herself

Isabel, the protagonist of Yael van der Wouden ’s remarkable debut novel, has an excruciating habit, at moments of tension or distress, of pinching and twisting the skin on the back of her hand until it is raw and red. The repeated gesture sums up her plight as a figure seething with resentments and desires that she keeps, rigidly and violently, in check. Isabel lives in the house in which she grew up and in which her mother died, in a small Netherlandish town 15 years after the end of the second world war, obsessively cleaning and polishing the tableware and other objects that her mother loved while ruling tyrannically over the meek local girl who is her maid. When her debonair and womanising brother – who has been promised the house as his inheritance, making Isabel’s residence there tenuous and time-limited – leaves the country for several weeks, he brings his new girlfriend, the vivacious and flamboyant Eva, to live with Isabel, threatening to loosen or to sever the tight coils into which she has wound her existence.

The stakes of Van der Wouden’s taut family drama slowly rise as it becomes clear that Isabel’s struggles to reckon with or move on from her mother’s death, and to find a way of being in the present, are a mirror and a symptom of a wider failure in the postwar Netherlands to reckon with and atone for the fate of Dutch Jews, offered up to the Nazis with little resistance, the gaps and the homes that they left behind seamlessly occupied and rarely relinquished to the few who returned. Van der Wouden’s superb earlier essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank , explored the ways in which that totemic, sentimentalised figure threatened to leave little space for her own explorations of her Dutch-Jewish identity; here she explores not the deportations and the mass murders but the quieter forgettings and self-justifications that came in their aftermath. “If they cared about it, they would have come back for it,” says one character of a Jewish family robbed of their home. “No. They’re gone. They’re gone or they don’t care. So many are gone.” Beneath such platitudes guilt lies buried.

Vividly bringing to life the everyday struggles of trans people, this Almodóvar-endorsed bestseller, set in 1980s Madrid, is affecting and evocative

Alana S Portero’s debut novel La mala costumbre , or Bad Habit , starts at an intensity of 11 and barely lets up. The first time the protagonist falls in love, aged five, is with her neighbour’s bloodied corpse after he has plunged to his death in a drug-induced stupor. He is a fallen angel to her: “I simply yearned with my entire soul to kiss something so lovely and helpless.”

This juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane runs throughout the rest of the novel, from its title to the many secondary characters, each of which is assigned a mythical double: the abusive man who lives across the hall is Bluebeard, his daughters Lady Godiva and Joan of Arc. Portero’s background as a historian lends these parallels depth and perspicacity, elevating what might otherwise be an unremittingly bleak story into a higher realm. As the protagonist gets older, she spends her nights in the arms of “dragon-men”, who are “tall, dark, and potbellied”, in an attempt to find the self-worth that is denied her elsewhere in life.

The Suede bassist and author on writing without a safety net, terrifying himself for his next novel and which of the Thursday Murder Club books – by his brother Richard – he likes best

Mat Osman is, along with Brett Anderson , a founding and current member of the band Suede, and the author of two novels. The Ruins , published in 2020, is a modern murder mystery about estranged brothers. His latest, The Ghost Theatre , is set in Elizabethan London and tells the tale of the Blackfriars Boys, a real life Elizabethan theatre troupe made up of children who were often snatched from the streets to act in popular plays of the day. They are joined by Shay, a young female “Aviscultan”; a worshipper of the birds that she communes with as she scales the city’s rooftops on the run from her enemies. The book has been widely praised and the Guardian picked it as one of its novels of 2023. Osman is the older brother of TV presenter and fellow novelist Richard Osman and lives in north-west London..

It isn’t the kind of book you imagine a musician would write…
I really hope that’s true. My first novel was about a musician, about brothers and stuff and it drew from [my] experience. [With The Ghost Theatre ] I was really aware that I wanted to write something without a safety net, where I had to make it all up. Because I want to be a writer, not a musician who has written a book.

Are we living through the end times? Dorian Lynskey interrogates our insatiable appetite for doom - and asks why each generation is so drawn to the idea that they will be the last

It is a sunny afternoon in Taormina, Sicily, and two wealthy couples on holiday are drinking Aperol spritz on a balcony overlooking the sea. Harper, who runs on anxiety and guilt, says she has trouble sleeping because of “everything that’s going on in the world”. Daphne, who runs on pleasure and denial, asks what she means. “Oh, I don’t know,” says Harper. “Just, like, the end of the world.” Daphne laughs. “Oh no, Harper! The world’s not ending, it’s not that bad.” She doesn’t follow the news any more. “And even if it was as bad as they say it is, I mean what can you really do, you know?” Harper and Daphne are sitting on the same beautiful hotel balcony, drinking the same expensive drinks, but only one of them is tormented by the sense that we are all doomed. “It’s like we’re all entertaining each other while the world burns,” says Harper.

This is a scene from season two of the HBO series The White Lotus , starring Aubrey Plaza as Harper and Meghann Fahy as Daphne. The show leaves open the question of whether Harper’s position is a morally responsible reaction to vast and dangerous problems or a yelp of impotent despair. “Such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick,” complains the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s 1964 novel Herzog. “We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it … Things are grim enough without these shivery games … We love apocalypses too much.”