If you have been into a bookshop since 2022, or perhaps even just breathed in and out, you could not have failed to clock the phenomenon that was Lessons in Chemistry. Bonnie Garmus’s debut remains a global sensation. The story of Elizabeth Zott, a gifted research chemist who, forced out of her lab by rampant 1950s misogyny, becomes the inspirational host of a TV cooking show, has so far sold a staggering 9m copies around the world. It spent the best part of two years on the Sunday Times bestseller list, was translated into more than 40 languages, and scooped numerous awards. In 2023 it became an Emmy-winning TV series; a year later New York Times readers voted it one of their top 100 books of the 21st century. Elizabeth Zott made such a splash that even her favoured brand of rowing machine saw a spike in sales.

What was the key to its prodigious success? Timing helped. In the aftermath of #MeToo, readers embraced a heroine who refuses to be cowed by injustice, who, thanks to resilience, pragmatism and straight-up hard work, ultimately comes out on top. The book is smart and very funny, a propulsive mashup of feminism and fairytale that balances darkness with whimsy, heartbreak with hope. It is also carries a shamelessly inspirational message. “Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies,” Zott exhorts her audience of housewives in the TV studio. “Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what you will change. And then get started.”

Garmus, then a copywriter, wrote the first chapter of Lessons in Chemistry in a fury after a meeting where a male colleague flagrantly took credit for her ideas: her anger “lit a fire under me about telling this story”. In Peck & Peck, her follow-up, there is less outrage crackling on the page but there are most definitely fires, and not metaphorical ones either. At the otherworldly New York offices of Peck & Peck, the most enigmatic, prestigious and dysfunctional poetry magazine in the world, the 39 editors have a single aim: to publish the world’s finest poems. Failed submissions – and every week there are thousands – are incinerated by the team of prison parolees who work in the mailroom.

Garmus’s sharp wit and gift for offbeat characters are both at full throttle in this quirky story of Batter Gray, a boy named for his mother’s improbably intrepid dog. Batter’s parents – his father teaches history, his mother designs typefaces – are eager for him to pursue a sensible, by which they mean lucrative, career; but Batter cares only for poetry. When by a marvellous fluke he lands a job at Peck & Peck, he is ecstatic, only to find himself in the basement churning out photocopies. Passionate about poems, pathologically unable to resist trouble, Batter is soon caught up in the bitter feud between the magazine’s two editors-in-chief, sworn enemies who just happen also to be twins.

Corporate machinations at a cultish poetry magazine in the 1980s might seem to offer slim pickings for any mainstream novel, let alone the follow-up to a monster blockbuster. The endangered future of poetry does not exactly sit alongside feminism as a rousing call to arms. Even Batter’s truth-telling typeface-fixated mother Rainey (a ringer for Elizabeth Zott) cannot duck the fact that poetry “is the bottom of the barrel arts-wise” and poets “never make a dime”. And yet from this apparently rarefied premise Garmus constructs a zany office comedy with shades of Hogwarts (Peck & Peck’s office building, with its vast glass dome, pneumatic tube delivery system and alphabetised balcony topiary, is as fantastical as anything in Rowling’s oeuvre) and the gleeful originality of early John Irving.

Though it sags a little in the middle, the result is a story that mostly zips along, and a resoundingly impassioned case for the importance of poetry in a profit-obsessed society that would gladly condemn it to extinction. Garmus’s riff on the poems that Peck & Peck sends straight to the incinerator is worth the price of admission alone: “anything on scented paper; anything written in only lowercase letters; anything that included a mention of self-publishing … poems that mentioned kittens, puppies, cooking, sandcastles, babies, sunrises, rainbows, running, beaches, cancer, or the word ‘namaste’ … Anything written on parchment … Anything using the word ‘methinks’”.

This aversion to mawkishness does not prevent it from creeping into Garmus’s own work. Readers irked by Six-Thirty, Lessons in Chemistry’s preternaturally intelligent dog, will find themselves no less vexed by Batter’s namesake, a rescue mutt whose credulity-stretching acts of heroism leave Lassie in the shade. And yet it is impossible not to be beguiled by Garmus’s irrepressible humour and the freewheeling exuberance of her imagination. It is hard to imagine a novel with more laugh-out-loud jokes about typography, harder still to dismiss her fierce exhortation to all of us to make words count. Will it repeat the mind-boggling success of Lessons in Chemistry? Probably not, but there are lessons in this book too that, in this terrifyingly accelerating age of AI, feel just as vital. “When you’re interested in poetry, you’re interested in everything,” one of Peck & Peck’s longstanding editors tells Batter. Garmus shows us that in spades.

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‘Don’t be weird about this,” representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughed into the camera as she prepared to jab a hormone-filled needle into her midsection, adding that she knew full well that, yes, people were definitely going to be weird about it. At 36, the congresswoman had begun freezing her eggs, and was making a point of bringing her online audience along with her as she did, stepping directly into the fraught question of how an ambitious woman should manage her fertility.

It’s a live concern: around the world, birthrates are falling sharply. “Only the Black Death in the 14th century is comparable to what is happening now,” Financial Times journalist Camilla Cavendish notes in a new book examining why. Setting aside the most toxic gender-war narratives, “the standard explanation is that as women get educated, they choose freedom and autonomy over family”. As Cavendish explains, however, that is “not the whole story”.

Drawing on a wealth of reporting, her book seeks to present a more nuanced picture. Cavendish begins with the “fertility gap” – the official name for the difference between the number of children people say they want and the number they actually go on to have – and works her way backwards, focusing on the lived experience of men and women who find themselves with fewer children than they expected. What stopped them?

For some, the main barrier is finding the right partner in time. For others, it comes down to the increasing costs of raising a family (where housing specifically can be a factor) and the enormous difficulty of balancing a career with caregiving, particularly when it takes longer to establish a professional foundation in the first place. There’s more: a “rational pessimism about prospects for the next generation” in an unstable world, the stigma of embracing motherhood, the shortage of stories glorifying father­hood, a pressure to perform “intensive parenting”, the lure of well-compensated but all-consuming “greedy jobs”, and so on. There’s also the sheer exhaustion that comes with caring for a small child. The headwinds are strong.

Taken together, “the joyous, messy, life-giving task of raising a family has become something that feels more like a daunting, lonely, and expensive chore,” Cavendish observes. “We’ve shifted, slowly but surely, into treating parent­hood like a self-indulgent lifestyle choice. The onus is on you to cope.” These aren’t abstract observations. Cavendish herself is a working mother of three, well acquainted with the difficulties of supporting a family and managing a career. She has no illusions about how hard it can be, and no interest in pretending otherwise. “I am struck by how little has changed in the workplace in the last 20 years, despite the rhetoric about flexibility,” she notes. “What has changed, I think, is how grimly realistic young women now are about the trade-offs.”

“Reproduction is kind of the whole ballgame,” the trailblazing feminist Gloria Steinem told David Remnick in a 2015 interview, “and who controls it is the most fundamental question.” Generation Maybe charts how authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Iran and elsewhere have responded to falling birthrates with a variety of repressive pronatalist policies – sanctioning child marriage, making divorce more difficult and denying abortion access. The Trump administration’s attacks on reproductive rights and federal childcare funding follow this trend, conscripting women into domestic roles. A simple solution to the problem of birth deficit is to force women to breed.

It may not be easy to create effective pronatalist policy interventions that encourage, rather than entrap – but it’s not impossible. Cavendish looks at what’s worked and what hasn’t in Singapore, Scandinavia and France, and outlines just shy of a dozen ways to help people choose children, from building more housing to offering parents benefits and even giving children themselves the vote: “Almost all policies which may help to lift birthrates are also ones which could enable human flourishing,” she notes.

There is no hectoring or finger-wagging in this book. What’s offered instead is an empathic and curious approach to an entirely rational ambivalence. In so doing, Generation Maybe illuminates the enormous gulf between popular talking points about fertility and the actual conversations potential parents are having. For Cavendish, the real goal isn’t to persuade anyone to have kids; it’s simply “to make children a genuine choice”.

My earliest reading memory
Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy – where an assortment of differently shaped dogs go on a walk – wormed its way into my subconscious when I was very young. The great dane (Hercules Morse, as big as a horse), the dalmatian (Bottomley Potts, covered in spots), the dachshund (Schnitzel Von Krumm with a very low tum) … I could probably still recite most of it from memory.

My favourite book growing up
I had a lot of picture books illustrated by the great Korky Paul, and remember being obsessed – even as quite a young child – with the intricate grotesquerie of it all. He’s probably best known these days for illustrating the Winnie the Witch books, but my favourite was The Rascally Cake by Jeanne Willis, in which a rotund, green-haired man called Rufus Skumskins O’Parsley makes a cake out of disgusting things (rotten eggs, spider legs, garden snails and so on), only for the cake to come to life and attempt to eat him. Probably more than a little bit of Skumskins found its way into the protagonist of my second novel, The Glutton.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I studied F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for my English GCSE and it entirely reshaped my brain. I still think it’s about as near to perfect as it’s possible for a novel to be. All the stupid loveliness and yearning in the world, distilled down into image after image, with a core of white-hot rage, at the way extreme wealth enables – necessitates, really – extreme cruelty. There’s functional alcoholism, and then there’s whatever Fitzgerald was doing in 1923. Everyone should read it.

The writer who changed my mind
I had a baby in May, and in the first weeks post-partum I read Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, by the poet and activist Adrienne Rich, while my son was napping on my belly. It made me realise that I’d wrongly – though, perhaps, understandably – held on to this notion that mothering would necessarily mean setting aside the work of the imagination, and a narrowing of my horizons, creatively. But Rich writes so thrillingly of parenthood as a politically radicalising and artistically activating experience. Rich’s work has made me excited for the years to come as a writer, as well as a mother. I wish I’d read her a long, long time ago.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Portrait of My Lover As a Horse by Selima Hill. I bought it with a book voucher in Foyles on Charing Cross Road, when I was about 14. I’d never heard of Hill, but I picked it up based on the strangeness of the title and cover. All of Hill’s poetry collections, as published by Bloodaxe, have this naive, under-designed quality to them. I read the whole collection front-to-back on the train home, and then again back-to-front. By the next day I was trying to emulate Hill’s guileless, cryptic style in my own – far less masterly – little poems. That was basically my apprenticeship as a poet.

The author I came back to
Jane Austen. Until my mid-20s I subscribed to that surprisingly common, reductive view of her as the author exclusively of novels about rich people having dinner at each other’s houses. But now I’m a rich person (in global terms, at least – I mean, I have Chanel foundation and a mortgage) who likes having dinner at other people’s houses, I’m like, this rules.

The book I reread
I often find myself revisiting bits of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. In case you aren’t aware of it, it’s about a gender-swapping and functionally immortal Elizabethan nobleman who spends several languid centuries falling in and out of love and eventually achieving something like self-knowledge. Such a totally exhilarating, audaciously fun bit of work from an author who was – bless her – a bit of a Debbie Downer overall.

The book I could never read again
The Sun Also Rises. I was worryingly into Ernest Hemingway, for a teenage girl, whereas now I think he’s a bit of a pillock.

The book I discovered later in life
I’m 35 so I flatter myself nothing I could say really counts, but: I thought I’d use my maternity leave to finally give some Donna Tartt a go. I staggered through The Goldfinch and thought it was extremely silly and bad.

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The book I am currently reading
I just finished What Am I, a Deer? by Polly Barton, and I was totally blown away by it. It’s about how we have fun and what we find funny, how we choose our friends and construct our pet fantasies, and I loved it, and I love how Barton’s brain works. She thinks so profoundly about the minutiae of modern life and modern social dynamics and I somehow found myself feeling strangely optimistic about the world and the eccentricities of the people in it. A banger.

Sir Ian Rankin rarely watches television. Certainly, there’s no gleaming flatscreen in the corner of the apartment in Edinburgh where he writes, listens to music and constructs elaborate Lego models (all four Beatles, their Yellow Submarine and, once, a 6ft version of the Eiffel Tower). Did he not see the most recent incarnation of his most famous creation, Detective Inspector John Rebus, this time played by Richard Rankin (no relation), in the wake of previous performances by Ken Stott and John Hannah? “I did,” he concedes. “They gave me them on DVD, so I could play them on my computer.”

Ah, his computer – it’s had its screen and hard drive replaced, and there are grooves in the keys. It sits on top of a plain, compact trestle-table desk he bought on London’s Charing Cross Road in 1987 and lugged back to his Tottenham flat on the tube; both have accompanied him from London to rural Dordogne, in southwest France, where he lived for a few years with his wife, Miranda, in the 1990s, and back to Edinburgh, where the couple and their two sons have been ever since.

But if all this makes him sound doggedly attached to the past, wary of change and of modernity, his work stands in stark contradiction. Across 26 Rebus books, a smaller series involving the detective Malcolm Fox, and a number of standalone novels and plays, Rankin has shown himself to be fiercely attentive to the most serious aspects of contemporary life. “The crime fiction I’m interested in,” he tells me, “is the crime fiction that’s looking at society and the mess we’re in and how we got there, and it’s predominantly political.”

His new novel, The Heights, takes on the challenge in dramatic and glittering style. Its title refers to a Knightsbridge apartment building aimed squarely at the highest end of the property market, its inhabitants the rich and famous who take as read that their residence will include a cinema and a luxury spa, and that visitors will pass by Chapman brothers artworks in its marble entrance hall. They are perhaps not expecting that their concierge will be discovered with his head bludgeoned, and that DS Gillian Gish will quickly appear on the scene to quiz them as to their whereabouts.

One of the influences feeding into Gish, a brand-new lead character, is 1970s American TV detective Columbo, whom Rankin – back in his TV-viewing days – found captivating. “I didn’t realise it when I was watching as a teenager, but he’s a socialist figure,” Rankin says. “He comes into these very rich people’s lives and tears them apart, and they don’t know he’s doing it until he’s already done it. I just thought that was extraordinary. It’s to do with class: he’s the underclass, they’re the overclass, and he’s going to bring them down. Rebus has done that in quite a few of the books. And Gish, I think, secretly really enjoys the idea that she’s going to upset them by asking the wrong questions and by interfering in their very comfortable, cosseted world.”

Gish has the kind of hinterland that Rebus lacks; she’s embedded in her own neighbourhood, in Rankin’s previous stomping ground of Tottenham, and after work she goes home to care for her mother. Her off-duty life contributes to the portrait of London as a series of wildly disconnected locations and social milieux. I ask him whether it was nerve-racking to leave the Edinburgh setting that he’s written about for so long? “I didn’t feel any trepidation,” he replies. “In some ways it can be a wee bit stifling. You get an idea for a story, you say, ‘Well, could that be contained in Edinburgh? And if it can’t be contained in Edinburgh, can I write it?’”

And he’s convinced that his story of the ostentatious performance of wealth combined, paradoxically, with the obsession with privacy of the ultra-rich, wouldn’t have worked in Edinburgh. A prosperous city it may be, but “You’re not going to see a Rolls-Royce or a Bugatti Veyron. The wealth here is discreet.”

The success of his novels has, of course, made Rankin himself a wealthy man, even if it did take him until his 60s – he’s 66 now – to get an office of his own. Over the years, he’s worked in a succession of spare rooms, attics and even next to a juddering washing machine, a clothes airer over his head. He is, he says, glad he didn’t make it big when he was young: “I was stupid. I’m sure I would have bought a Lamborghini and a pinball machine for every room in the house.”

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Now, he and Miranda live a few minutes’ walk away from the writing flat, and take trips to far-flung places. “Miranda decided a few years ago that, now the kids have left and we’ve got money in the bank: before we get too old and we lose the use of our limbs and our brains, we should travel. I am holiday agnostic. She’s the one who tells me, right, you’re going here and you’re going there. So we do a lot of travelling, just in the last three or four years maybe. She’s booking through to 2028 at the moment.”

When he’s away, he researches but can’t actually write. On a recent cruise around South America, he hadn’t even taken the ancient laptop and was making notes in longhand when a fellow passenger offered him the loan of a computer – which explains the message of gratitude at the end of The Heights. But when he does come back to base, he writes quickly, and determinedly, although he bats away being described as unusually productive. At the couple’s house in Cromarty, “if the weather’s nice, I get no writing done. If the weather’s bad, I get a lot of writing done because there’s nothing else to do. I’m the laziest, hard-working author I know.”

But aside from buying vinyl, seeing the odd live band – seated gigs only these days, he concedes ruefully – Lego and holidays, Rankin has another use for his earnings. Each year, between 30 and 40% of his net income goes into the charitable trust that he and Miranda set up, for which their older son, Jack, also works. “I’ve got more money than I can spend. Once you’ve bought a nice hi-fi system and you’ve got a nice car, what are you going to do?”

The trust’s focus is on smaller charities, often those supporting young people and adults with special needs – people like the Rankins’ younger son, Kit, who has Angelman syndrome, a genetic condition that means he has severe learning difficulties, and has also experienced epilepsy and vision problems. Now in his early 30s, Kit lives in a care facility nearby, and all four of them meet up every Sunday. “Any money that we leave behind when we shuffle off this mortal coil will get channelled to him to make sure that he’s always looked after. And our older son will be part of that process of looking after him financially.”

I feel that I can’t leave without asking about Rebus, whom we last saw behind bars, following the death of his old adversary, gangster “Big Ger” Cafferty. Rankin is tight-lipped on his next project – back to Rebus, or perhaps another outing for Gillian Gish? – but does shed some light on Rebus’s future. After all, I say, you left him in a pretty parlous state. “Everybody says that, but it’s not true,” he protests. “At the end of the book, his lawyer says, ‘You’ve got some very good news.’ So he’s obviously getting out. You know the appeal is going to be heard and he’s going to get out. I have no doubt in my mind that’s the happy ending.”

And with that, Sir Ian Rankin is off to do a bit of writing before an evening out. Possibly he’ll drop into the Oxford Bar, where the locals’ only acknowledgment of his elevated status is to ask, “Where’s your horse”? And you sense he wouldn’t have it any other way.

One of Donald Trump’s more diabolical talents is his ability to land on the right things in the wrong way. Since his first term, Trump has been obsessed with the Arctic – Greenland in particular – something that has puzzled and enraged many, particularly in Europe. He first brought up the idea of buying the icy landmass from Denmark in 2019. Right after re-election, he began ramping up his rhetoric about acquiring it “one way or another”, threatening the Nato alliance and the foundations of post-second world war security.

Trump got his way – thankfully without military force – in September, when the US and Denmark signed an agreement that allowed for many more US troops on the island, albeit without the sort of takeover that the president enjoys “joking” about. “The United States will FOREVER have the complete ability to do what is necessary in Greenland,” Trump wrote on social media. “We will work with the people of Greenland in its development and construction.”

Europeans could be forgiven for doubting that the US president would help any country in its development, let alone Greenland. But the truth is that there is something in Trump’s obsession with a place that has more reindeer than people, and he isn’t the first to suggest the US should own it; President Andrew Johnson floated the idea in 1867. The fact is that since the cold war, Greenland has played a crucial role in North American security, with airfields close to the eastern seaboard, vast mineral resources and a location perfectly suited to tracking Arctic weather (something crucial to military movements).

More recently, it has become a pawn in the US-China geopolitical struggle. As Jeff Landry, the US special envoy to Greenland wrote in early 2026, greater American presence there would “facilitate deployment of advanced missile defense systems” and “crowd out hostile Chinese and Russian influence”. While there are no explicit Chinese or Russian security threats on the island now, many in the administration fear that if Greenland becomes independent – as it has said it wants to be by 2033 – it will be more open to Chinese or Russian influence campaigns.

Whether you agree with them or not, the region is certainly becoming a geostrategic hotspot. Russia is upping energy transit there to avoid global choke points, and China declared itself a “near-Arctic state” in 2018. Security and military drills have been conducted by both countries close to US territorial waters near Alaska. All of this puts the US’s biggest adversaries squarely in its back yard, at a time when it’s unclear what the new, post-neoliberal world order will be, and how either Europe or Greenland will fit into it.

Beyond geopolitics, there’s another reason for all the interest in the Arctic: climate change. When the seas at the top of the world were frozen solid, nobody cared much about what was happening there. But over the past few decades, global heating has opened the possibility of resource extraction (the Arctic seabed is filled with gas, oil and rare-earth minerals, most of which have yet to be mined or even claimed by individual nations). It has also made possible the passage by sea of energy supplies and goods – something that has been coveted by various powers for hundreds of years.

In August, a Chinese shipping company, Sea Legend, started a weekly trans-polar commercial route across the Arctic, through Russian territorial waters. It claims that the voyage will cut the usual 40-day journey time between Europe and Asia in half, something that seems pretty attractive given the Houthi threat in the Red Sea. Of course, to take advantage of new pathways in the Arctic, you need ships, icebreakers in particular. The US, which has very little capacity in this area, has recently started trying to make them jointly with Finland, a project that was endorsed by both Joe Biden and Trump. But the lack of icebreakers is symptomatic of a larger problem.

In 1975, the US shipbuilding industry was ranked No 1 in terms of global capacity, with more than 70 commercial ships on order for production domestically. Just over 50 years later, the US now produces less than 1% of the world’s commercial vessels. China, meanwhile, has tripled its production relative to the US over the past two decades, producing more than 1,000 ocean-going vessels last year, versus the US’s 10. The resulting asymmetry comes with commercial and military concerns for the US, but also for any country that depends on it for security. More than 90% of military equipment, supplies and fuel travels by sea.

That goes to a larger point – conflict in the Arctic is happening against the backdrop of the end of the neoliberal era, which brought modern globalisation and great wealth, but also increased inequality and a sense that policymakers operating at a great height in the national interest were sometimes out of step with the economic reality of communities on the ground.

The pendulum is now swinging back. In the US, Repubicans and Democrats alike are pushing industrial policy to restore industries such as shipbuilding and chip-making. While efforts are sometimes couched with xenophobic, anti-China rhetoric, the truth is that one country dominating any strategic industry isn’t in the interests of workers or nation states. It’s an issue that the EU, too, is now coming to terms with, as cheap Chinese electric cars, steel, lithium batteries and solar panels move from US markets to Europe.

Trump’s focus on Greenland may not be as misplaced as it seems at first glance, then. But there’s a glaring flaw in his approach. In a world that will be dominated by new spheres of influence, the US needs friends. Europe does, too. Shared supply chains, security agreements and trade pathways can all be used to mutual advantage. But it will take careful statecraft of the kind that this administration isn’t exactly known for.

Trump’s limbic brain knows that Greenland, and the Arctic at large, is important. What he doesn’t seem to understand is how to put aside his own ego and ambitions to make sure that the US can secure its own hemispheric back yard in ways that don’t destroy its existing alliances. Here’s hoping the next administration does better: the US’s future will depend on it.

Rana Foroohar is a columnist and associate editor at the FT and the author of Sea Change: America’s New Great Game in the Arctic Circle (Swift).

Further reading

Chokepoints by Edward Fishman (Elliott & Thompson, £10.99)

The Next World War by Peter Apps (Wildfire, £12.99)

Unfrozen by Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds (Yale, £20).

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (Penguin, £9.99)
This short novel won almost every genre award following its 2016 US publication. As a Black writer, LaValle had a conflicted relationship with the works of HP Lovecraft. As a child, he loved the tales of cosmic horror, but grew to recognise the racism and other prejudices of the author. Unable to “throw the man’s stories away” because of how formative they were on his own imagination, he decided to write his own response to one of the most obviously racist, The Horror at Red Hook, recasting it through the perspective of a musician and hustler from 1920s Harlem later known as Black Tom. It’s a powerful tale of horror – both everyday and the occult – told with sheer brilliance.

As You Wake, Break the Shell by Becky Chambers (Hodderscape, £22)
In this cosy science fiction love story set on a distant planet, life is a constant struggle for the human colonists. As the book opens, botanist Signy is yet to meet the love of her life, Cora, a rorqual pilot. Rorquals are gigantic interplanetary creatures, trained by human pilots whose implants allow them to communicate with the beasts as they transport supplies. Chapter 1 is followed by chapter 764, set more than a decade later, when the two women are blissfully married. The non-linear narrative may reflect what we’re told is the rorqual view of time, but it also removes much suspense. The characters are adorable, and the details of growing plants in an artificial environment, or Cora’s relationship with her rorqual, are enjoyable, but readers may grow impatient with the glacial pace and reiterations of their feelings for one another. Even the “naturally solitary” rorqual is given to declaring its love for Cora. In the final pages there’s a tonal shift that ends on a cliffhanger: how Cora and Signy survive is to be revealed in a sequel.

The Eye of Goliath by Diego Muzzio, translated by Rahul Bery (Pushkin, £12.99)
This first novel by an award-winning Argentinian writer is an old-fashioned tale of madness and the horrors of war. In an asylum on the outskirts of Edinburgh, circa 1920, Dr Pierce hopes to cure severely traumatised patients by hypnosis. All the men, including the doctor, carry wounds from the first world war. His latest case, David Bradley, was an engineer, but is now unable to do anything but desperately attempt to swim on dry land, until overcome by exhaustion. Bradley’s diary reveals the reason behind the man’s gradual descent into madness, as, cold and starving in an abandoned lighthouse, the rescue he expects keeps failing to arrive. Bradley’s own discovery of papers left behind by the last lighthouse keeper, a naturalist with a talent for taxidermy who murdered his family, adds another interlocking piece to this irresistible, haunting gothic horror.

Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm (Orbit, £22)
In 2002, Marina is a young American of mixed heritage who takes a trip to Haifa, the city where her Palestinian grandmother Nuhad was born and lived as a child, until the family was driven out by the Israeli occupation in 1948. Nuhad never spoke about that terrible time, and now that she is dead, Marina wants to understand. When she finds her grandmother’s house, it is empty, for sale, and generally known to be haunted. Previous occupants have either vanished or died in mysterious circumstances. Entering, she feels anger, but then a flood of happy memories from Nuhad’s childhood. The house is more than simply haunted – it has become a vessel for vengeance, channelling death while longing for a return of the family it loved. The author allows the house to speak, which jars with the more realistic approach taken elsewhere. Despite a few missteps, this is a powerful, affecting novel about Palestinian loss and trauma.