THOMAS GAGE

By James Fleming

Vintage, £6.99

Thomas, landed by way of marriage, resides at the Norfolk pile of Fordwell where he paints and glories in his family; the wings of his joy "beat violently, their tips thrashing at the walls of his heart". But a part of Thomas’s estate is desired by Gooby, a reptilian businessman who plans to build a railway that will make Cromer the Brighton of the east. Much of the pleasure of Fleming’s Victorian melodrama lies in his managing to make the manifold details of mid-19th century English life the novel contains appear unselfconscious, although its confident distribution of incident and twist should not be undervalued. Thomas’s sorry diminution from cheery, philandering patriarch to laudanum-quaffing spectre is handled with great skill, as is the subtextual tension between red-cheeked English pastoralism and red-toothed English industrialism. Fleming is a good all-rounder, his satisfying characterisation and plotting matched by a pronounced talent for simile and nature writing of such charm that I will now think first of it, and not Bernard Matthews, whenever I hear mention of Norfolk.

HAVE MERCY ON US ALL

By Fred Vargas

Vintage, £6.99

Someone is bringing the plague back to Paris, daubing doors with talismanic symbols of protection and releasing chilling snippets from Samuel Pepys’s diary of 1665. Commissaire Adamsberg is one of the more fascinating policemen to have appeared in European crime fiction of late, his wayward affairs and numerous idiosyncrasies dwelt upon as much as his keen deductive mind. Vargas announces herself as a mystery writer of similarly seductive unorthodoxy.

A BRIEF STAY WITH THE LIVING

By Marie Darrieussecq

Faber, £6.99

I feared baldness, so often was I scratching my head during much of this intense stream-of-consciousness novel about a family’s tragic past. One’s persistence will eventually be rewarded as the narrative’s abstruse manoeuvrings between a mother and three daughters over the course of a single day succeed in building up an emotional charge of no small power. But my word, getting there entails traversing some forbidding terrain.

MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON

By Jan Blensdorf

Vintage, £6.99

Our narrator sits behind a screen above a Tokyo incense shop and listens to men’s problems. Blensdorf, an Australian who spent two years in Japan, certainly feels the experience gave her the right to administer a good cultural kicking to the place: the only strong characters here are a Frenchman and the book’s half-Japanese, half-American narrator. Her writing is all taste and no flavour, its mutedness leaving an emotional hollow at her novel’s heart.

BACHELOR BOYS

By Kate Saunders

Arrow, £6.99

Cassie, the young editor of a literary review, is charged with finding wives for the bachelor sons of Phoebe, her adored, dying adoptive mother. At one point, with her own affair of the heart disintegrating, she memorably remarks that she "had started out in Helen Fielding, and ended up in Anita Brookner". Saunders’s Hampstead love story, amusingly fascistic in its doe-eyed proselytising of cosy coupledom, is an enjoyable cut above the usual lonely hearts fare.

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