Wakening by Derek Johns
Billy Palmer, the central character of Derek Johns's earlier novel, Wintering, has left behind his grey, provincial childhood, dropped out of university and moved to London. The year is 1968, and, for others if not for 20-year-old Billy, the 1960s are still swinging. On the periphery of the parties, the musical revolution and the political protests that define the decade, Billy works in a bookshop and dreams of an escape to North Africa and the kind of exotic adventure that he has so far only imagined. The dangers of banality and bathos hover over any narrative that deliberately uses the plainest of prose styles to record the experiences of a very ordinary hero and Johns, despite his largely successful evocation of the period, never really escapes them.

Blackmoor by Edward Hogan
At the heart of Edward Hogan's memorable debut novel are a lost community and a lost woman. The locality is Blackmoor, a Derbyshire pit village destroyed by the events of the 1980s miners' strike and by the discovery of dangerous gases lurking in the abandoned mines. The woman is Beth Cartwright, a young wife and mother, whose eccentricity and mental fragility gradually isolate her from her husband and her fellow villagers. Moving smoothly in time between events leading up to Beth's mysterious death and her teenage son's struggle, 10 years later, to understand what happened to the mother he barely remembers, Blackmoor becomes a haunting study of losses which, like the firedamp accumulating in the pits, still threaten the lives of those who seem to have survived them.

Before I Knew Him by Anna Ralph
In Durham, student Leo Fisch awaits the arrival of David Caldwell, a friend he has not seen since they were teenagers and shared a summer of sex and secrets in a run-down coastal town. David, a soldier hardened and embittered by a tour of duty in Iraq, brings news that the most terrible secret of that summer (the one that still binds these two extremely different men together) is in danger of being exposed. Ralph's story of a revitalised intense relationship struggles to carry conviction when it remains in the present, and moves towards an almost entirely predictable denouement. It gathers real power only when it turns to the past and explores the beginnings of the friendship between nervous, repressed Leo and the seemingly tougher yet equally damaged David.

Wakening by Derek Johns
Portobello £10.99 pp202
Blackmoor by Edward Hogan
Simon & Schuster £11.99 pp278
Before I Knew Him by Anna Ralph
Hutchinson £17.99 pp314

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