A love triangle culminates in tragedy in this cleverly constructed thriller, based on real-life events

Inspired by a real-life murder case in Eastbourne a hundred years ago, Emma Flint’s artfully constructed thriller tells of a love triangle that culminates in tragedy. It features Beatrice Cade, a thirtysomething typist in the early 1920s who resides in a room at a ladies’ club in Bloomsbury. Beatrice has reconciled herself to being single, childless and invisible – she will later be described by a lawyer as “the kind of woman you fail to notice on the omnibus every single day” – until she catches the eye of Thomas Ryan, a charismatic new salesman at her firm. Thomas, she learns, is married, though he persuades her that he and his wife are desperately unhappy, leading him to seek intimacy elsewhere.

The book alternates between Bea’s story and that of Kate, Ryan’s wife, who is shocked to open the door to two policemen asking questions about her husband and the death of a woman in her 30s. “I don’t understand, I am only his wife,” she tells them.

A heart bypass in 2019 followed by a Covid infection left the novelist unable to read a book, let alone write one. Five years on, he recalls the steps that have helped him back on the right path

It has been a peculiar and exasperating five years. I’m a writer. I do other things but writing feels like my main reason for being on the planet. Thanks to a triple heart bypass, some underperforming psychiatric medication and long Covid, however, I’ve been unable to write for most of that period. Much of the time it’s been impossible to read as well.

The heart bypass happened in early 2019, three weeks before my last novel, The Porpoise , was published. Consequently, I had to do interviews either reclining on the sofa at home like a poodle-less Barbara Cartland or down the line from Radio Oxford which, after you’ve had your chest opened with a circular saw and have trouble remembering your own phone number, feels like driving way too fast through thick fog.

A woman acquires supernatural abilities on Ibiza in this follow-up to The Midnight Library

“I am not special,” says Grace Winters, the narrator of Matt Haig ’s follow-up to his bestseller The Midnight Library . “I am a crotchety old Brit. I am a retired maths teacher from the middle of nowhere. I am a big nothing, is who I am.” But as you might suspect if you’re familiar with Haig’s habit of conjuring the extraordinary out of the ordinary, Grace is far from being a big nothing. When she unexpectedly finds herself on the island of Ibiza, she realises just how much of a something she really is.

A small, long-ago act of kindness towards her colleague Christina leads to Grace being bequeathed a house in the Balearics in Christina’s will. Puzzled as to why a virtual stranger would do such a thing, Grace, recently widowed and still carrying guilt from the childhood death of her son, decides to visit Ibiza to find out, and to investigate Christina’s drowning there. It will be a distraction from her own problems, because “joint pain is like grief, the more you think about it, the more it hurts”.

There are flashes of sharp wit in this furious tale of a toxic relationship between two women, but mostly it roils with raw pain

In her last novel, The Exhibitionist , Charlotte Mendelson explored with glorious relish the torments of being married to a monster. Ray Hanrahan, a one-time YBA and full-time egomaniac, is abusive, manipulative and misogynist, an alloy of self-aggrandisement and self-pity. As his family gathers for his first exhibition in more than a decade, his more talented wife, Lucia, must decide whether to sabotage her own success as a sculptor to save her marriage. It is a brilliant and blackly comic study of narcissistic dysfunction, powered by the double desire to see Lucia break free as a woman and an artist, and the unspeakable Ray get his just deserts. Gimlet-eyed, sharp-tongued, blisteringly precise, it crackles with female fire and fury.

That fury cranks up to 11 in Wife, the evisceration of another toxic marriage, this time between two women. Zoe and Penny have been together 18 years and have two teenage daughters, Rose, biologically Penny’s, and Matty, biologically Zoe’s, but, after years of emotional abuse, Zoe has reached breaking point. Over the course of a single harrowing day she and Matty must move out of the family home with or without Rose, a conflict that is tearing her in two. She must also survive a mediation meeting with Penny, the girls’ biological father, Robin, and Robin’s sister (and Penny’s ex) Justine, all of whom blame Zoe for absolutely everything that has gone wrong.

This tale of cynicism and miracles in remote Scotland offers a bleakly funny vision of life

Gillis is searching for a higher purpose. That’s why, at the age of 31, he has become the minister of a crumbling Scottish kirk with a nonexistent congregation in a sleepy coastal town. Also, he needs work. It was this or the supermarket. “It’s not a bad job,” the outgoing minister confides. “The wages aren’t much, but you get the manse guaranteed, and a motor, and you’ll have your mornings and evenings. Mostly, it’s just hospital, funeral, home by five.”

Not a bad deal. But Gillis, it seems, is destined for greater things. And in Phantom Limb, Chris Kohler’s wonderfully farcical and apocalyptic debut novel, we soon find him performing miracles and taking on the mantle of messiah. It is a story of failure and desperation that links Scotland’s past to its present in twinned narratives that alternate between Gillis’s doomed venture and the travails of an apprentice painter named Jan in pre-Reformation Scotland.

A master of the short story explores mortality and beyond, through these funny, boundlessly intelligent visions of the angel of death

America is an increasingly strange place these days, but perhaps the strangeness was always lurking in the things that made its culture seem familiar, even comforting, to those who were reared elsewhere. Take, for example, the use of the word “God”, who is always blessing America. He is not much invoked by politicians on this side of the Atlantic (except in Ulster, where He also did a great job), because we would find that specious. Nor do we have religious novelists, like the great Marilynne Robinson, who writes from a place of belief and teaches theology in her spare time. Faith and the problems of faith still animate American fiction. Even the bloody sacramentalism of Cormac McCarthy can feel religious, if only by opposition.

Like Robinson, Joy Williams is acquainted with the devil and she knows what it is to be saved. Williams’s father was a congregationalist preacher and her grandfather a Welsh Baptist minister. She has the same spiritual rhythms as Robinson, but the stakes are higher in Williams, and a lot more fun. She does horror and incomprehensibility as well as the ecstatic, and she does it all deadpan. I want to say that if you banged a Robinson novel off one by Cormac McCarthy, the sparks that flew would be something like Williams, except that neither of those writers does funny and Williams is the kind of funny you can’t explain. In her new collection Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael , the humour comes from Williams’s wryness and her brevity, the way she whisks a joke away, obliging the reader to follow on.

A journalist travels across the US to unravel the secrets surrounding the life and death of his Ethiopian immigrant father

Dinaw Mengestu’s haunting novel about 21st-century American life starts with a sudden death. The deceased man is Samuel – a charismatic, witty, enigmatic Ethiopian immigrant whom our narrator, Mamush, thinks of as his father. But Samuel’s life will turn out to be every bit as mysterious as his demise, and as full of contradictions as America itself.

When Mamush learns of Samuel’s death, he leaves his wife and child behind in France and returns to the close-knit Ethiopian community in Washington DC that shaped his childhood. He’s propelled forward by feelings of personal grief, but also a professional urge to investigate the truth. Mamush is a journalist who, not unlike his creator – the recipient of the Guardian first book award for his fiction, and also accolades for reportage – has had success writing about conflicts at home and abroad. But he has grown tired of covering “long-simmering border conflicts and the refugee crises that grew out of them”, and meeting the needs of editors for whom, he drily notes, “dictators were once again all the rage”.

Authors and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I’ve always found Lauren Bravo’s writing a comforting treat; a lot like chatting away to your funny friend. I’ve just finished her new novel Probably Nothing and it’s nothing short of a dark comedy masterpiece. The premise is already funny – main character Bryony has decided to stop seeing (sleeping with) Ed, but before she can break it off, he dies. That could be the somewhat abrupt end of their dalliances were it not for the fact that Ed’s misrepresented their extremely casual, sexual relationship to his loved ones as something far more serious. Before Bryony knows it, she’s thrust into the centre of his funeral plans, like the grieving widow on top of a black funeral cake, unsure if and when it’s OK to tell them all that poor dead Ed was lying.

20 November 1962 : The writer talks to Denis Hart about leaving County Clare for London, debut novel The Country Girls, and her new play

Roughly half an hour after the appointed time, I met, under the blue ceilings and plastic chandeliers of the New Arts Theatre Club (where her first play, A Cheap Bunch of Nice Flowers, opens tonight), a country girl, born and brought up in Clare, with a scrubbed face, shiny nose, and longish brown hair. We settled down to tea and madeira cake, and Miss O’Brien, sloughing the man’s sheepskin overcoat that she had been clutching about her, spoke to me in a soft Irish voice more or less as follows:

I often wonder why, when Cromwell said “To hell or to Connaught” he didn’t include Clare. I left it and went to Dublin to study pharmacy and became a qualified pharmacist after four years. Here they’d call it a chemist. I had no interest in it at all and I married a novelist called Ernest Gébler who lived just outside Dublin. We have two sons, not really small any longer, one nine and one seven, and we lived in Dublin until we came here to live four years ago. I had written bits and pieces for Irish newspapers and Iain Hamilton advised me to write a novel and I actually began it during the first month after our arrival in London. That was The Country Girls . London was strange to me. I hate strangeness. It sort of frightens me. That’s why I don’t want to travel. Scenery bores me. Even furniture is only important to me for its associations. I didn’t realise I would miss Ireland so much, and in a way the book was a private recreation of my early life. Both my novels are about things I’ve done myself, or wish I’d done myself, or imagine I’ve done myself. When I’m actually writing, if I was consciously aware that anyone was ever going to read what I was writing I could never write a line. Most people I know who write have certain fixed ambitions that they’ve always had and this astonishes me: I’ve never set out and never do set out to do anything.