It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit together to make a new whole”. He spends his days making sculptures from broken pottery; the shards of his life.

During a warm winter’s day, Daniel steps outside to find that the longan tree in his garden has fallen during a storm. The tree was an heirloom of sorts – a family emblem of home and belonging for generations before him.

Mirandi Riwoe’s A Short History of Longans is not, in the straightforward sense, Daniel’s story. Indeed, as the title suggests, it’s a multigenerational story of how the longan tree got to be here, at this particular point in time. The book opens with a fictional biography: Ah Yang, a Chinese Australian bushranger, active in Queanbeyan in the 1850s. The family that branches out from under him ends with Daniel. So what of the centuries between? How is Ah Yang connected to Daniel, and to the longan tree?

As the longan dies, an immensely complex network of relationships and stories is uncovered. The roots that have carried Daniel here begin to show.

As with much of Riwoe’s previous work, including her Stella prize-shortlisted and Queensland Literary award-winning novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain, A Short History of Longans is historical fiction, though some sections reach into a near future. It’s told primarily from the perspectives of four characters across 200 years: Daniel in 2049; his aunt Wendy, suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s in the early 2000s; his great-aunt Ruby, a Chinese Australian film actor struggling to break into 1950s Hollywood; and his great-great-great-grandmother Maria, the unlikely matriarch, whose story stretches from the 1850s into the mid-20th century. There’s a particular focus on Chinese Australian experiences across time, and the nuances of race, gender and immigration are explored as each member of the family negotiates belonging and assimilation in different ways.

Initially, the book appears as though it will unfold in four seasonal movements – winter with Daniel, autumn with Wendy, summer with Ruby, spring with Maria. But then the structure begins to unfurl, loosen and accelerate. In the 1900s, minor characters step briefly into focus before disappearing again; marriages, children and relationships accumulate until the family tree – at first a static diagram – seems to become a living organism. Though these characters inhabit different times and places, we soon begin to see how they are formed by the same inheritances and how each of them, in turn, shapes the next.

Many of Riwoe’s characters are in their mid to late life and still undergoing transformation. It’s refreshing to encounter a novel so centrally interested in the ever-changing lives of older people, and so resistant to an arc of youthful self-discovery. As Wendy forgets her own life, she feels “the narrowing fragments of time bearing down upon her”. “Where does the time go?” she asks herself. We begin to see that there are some things – shame, regret, unhappiness – that she is actively choosing to leave behind.

The novel is concerned with memory and storytelling; what we cannot remember, and what we try to forget. Though they work hard at “burying the hard facts around the grey matter”, it becomes clear that every member of the family is carrying their own pain, and shame that should never have been theirs to carry. “The shame you speak of is counterfeit, my darling,” Maria tells her granddaughter. “Something manufactured by the mean and unimaginative.”

It’s in the exploration of intergeneration memory that this work particularly excels. Gabor Maté writes of family histories of trauma as “stories within stories, receding in time”. Riwoe maps this transmission with a sensitivity that brought me to tears several times.

A Short History of Longans is almost 300 pages, but I finished it in a single sitting. Riwoe’s densely descriptive prose makes for lovely reading. Even when her sentences occasionally verge on excessively long and stylised, her command of language and image are undeniable. Some segments feel simplified – Ruby’s experiences as an Oriental expert and actor, for example – but Riwoe’s ability to inhabit the minds of her characters makes even these moments entertaining.

There is a profound sense of connection and continuity at the centre of this work. But there’s also deep pain, loneliness and misunderstanding. Perhaps the great tragedy is that these things must necessarily sit side by side.

Like Daniel’s sculptures, A Short History of Longans is assembled from fragments; memories that cross time and space, each with its own sharp edges. In bringing them together, Riwoe creates a family portrait that makes two centuries of imagined history feel as though it has been lived.

A one-sitting read is typically the domain of the short story – a form that largely depends on a reader’s pure, unbroken attention. But there is some­thing special about the intensity of beginning and ending an entire book in a single day. Of all my reading experiences, these have been among the most memorable.

As a judge for last year’s Booker prize, faced with 153 books and just over six months in which to read them, it was my task to try to turn every novel into one that could be read in a day. While I loved the experience, it wasn’t exactly a recipe for satisfying reading.

Booker judging aside, everyone’s time feels squeezed. The Booker prizes recently published research co-authored by the Reading Agency that reported 35% of readers struggle to finish books. The publisher Vintage describes its new collection of “short masterpieces” – by writers including Nella Larsen, Ursula K Le Guin, Toni Morrison and Fyodor Dostoevsky – as books that fit “contemporary reading lives”. And it’s true that if you pick a book of the appropriate dimensions and take the right precautions (phone in another room, don’t answer the door), reading a book in a day becomes a real possibility – particularly with summer holidays coming up.

But what to choose? That’s where this list comes in. It’s a personal selection, not a comprehensive one. And I’ve omitted some great but perhaps overfamiliar candidates – Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Ethan Frome. But all these books, familiar or not, are worth a day of your time.

Assembly
Natasha Brown
A hundred pages long and written in vignettes that leave a lot of white space on the page, there is something brilliantly, startlingly aggressive about Assembly’s economy. Brown’s debut is narrated by a young Black woman working in finance (Brown’s own career before becoming a novelist). She has success; money; a loving, liberal, generationally wealthy boyfriend. She seems to have it all. But boiling up from the book’s depths comes a desperate rage: “I am what we’ve always been to the empire: pure, fucking profit.”

Kick the Latch
Kathryn Scanlan
Sonia is a horse trainer who has spent decades working at racetracks across America. In a note at the end of Kick the Latch, Scanlan thanks the mysterious Sonia “for the conversations”, and this is a book packed with rich, unusual details that come from a true insider. Priests bless horses’ legs; jockeys puke to make weight; vets give B12 shots not just to the animals in their care but the riders, too. In terse, controlled prose, Scanlan plunges us into the arcana of a closed world.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by HT Willetts
There are many novels set entirely on one day – Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, Under the Volcano – but very few of them can also be read in a matching span of time. Solzhenitsyn’s novel begins with the prison camp reveille of a hammer being banged on a rail and ends 150 pages later with its eponymous character going to sleep. Between these points we are immersed in the brutal daily struggle for survival that is life – or more often death – in the Soviet gulag.

By Night in Chile
Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews
The priest, poet and literary critic Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, delirious on his deathbed, embarks on a dizzying monologue that takes in falconry, war, Nobel prize-winning writers and Catholic guilt. Bolaño’s novella is a high-wire act, a wonder of rhythm and pacing. Its most audacious invention, a torture chamber operating under the cover provided by a literary salon, blends Bolaño’s obsessive interest in literature, fascism and violence so completely as to seem self-parodic. Of course, it turns out to be taken from life.

Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
David, the protagonist of Baldwin’s second novel, is a white gay American reflecting on his Parisian love affair with a bartender called Giovanni. Much has been said about the sexual and racial politics, but on a first reading what grips is the intensity of its description. When David walks towards Giovanni, the gay bar’s newest employee causing a stir among the clientele, he feels as if he’s “moving into the field of a magnet”, or “approaching a small circle of heat”. And we feel it too.

Train Dreams
Denis Johnson
Johnson’s haunting, at times almost unbearably beautiful novella about the life of a railroad labourer and logger has had a long journey to ubiquity. First published in the Paris Review in 2002, it didn’t appear as a book until 2011. Now, with the recent release of Clint Bentley’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, it has become Johnson’s best-known work. For me, though, the film is weak beer beside the novella, the spare majesty of which is salted with the startling, surreal moments of everyday life.

Memorial
Alice Oswald
Being in the audience to see Oswald recite Memorial – without reference to the text – is one of the great live literary experiences of my life. An “oral cemetery” naming more than 200 of the dead from Homer’s Iliad, her poem uses repeating, chant-like stanzas and arresting similes, taken primarily from the natural world, to build a tomb from language. Constantly surprising, utterly absorbing, the poem demands to be read as a song is listened to, in one concentrated sitting.

A Case of Hysteria (Dora)
Sigmund Freud, translated by Anthea Bell
One of only a handful of case histories Freud wrote about his own patients, A Case of Hysteria has been described as “a classical Victorian domestic drama”. Dora, whose real name was Ida Bauer, claimed to have resisted sexual advances made by her father’s friend. Whatever your take on Freud’s methodology – here he often seems more interrogator than doctor – his narrative skill in revealing aspects of the case, particularly connections between Dora’s symptoms and her dreams, is pronounced.

The Comfort of Strangers
Ian McEwan
There’s more than a hint of the Freudian to McEwan’s most uncanny novel. “Colin and Mary had never left the hotel so late,” he writes in the opening pages of this bracingly nasty book, “and Mary was to attribute much of what followed to this fact.” So begins a short, brutal descent into manipulation and violence, as these two holidaymakers fall into the orbit, and under the spell, of another couple. The book is only made more menacing by blending its sense of threat with a dreamlike languor and beauty.

The Cost of Living
Deborah Levy
The second volume of Levy’s “living autobiography”, The Cost of Living describes the end of a long marriage and the death of the author’s mother. The end of a marriage means downsizing, hard to accomplish with two children who need time and space. Writing demands the same, and in part this is a book about a writer being brave enough to define herself as one. And the scene with the e-bike and the flattened chicken is indelible.

When We Cease to Understand the World
Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West
Fictional essays? Essayistic fictions? A nonfiction novel? How best to classify Labatut’s addictive exploration of mathematical and scientific concepts and their authors, from the rivalrous Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger to tormented Alan Turing and reclusive genius Alexander Grothendieck? Better, perhaps, to forget about categorisation and simply dive into a book that captures the strangeness and significance of the past two centuries’ fundamental scientific breakthroughs, and the price they exacted in sanity.

Wittgenstein’s Nephew
Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock
The semi-autobiographical account of Thomas Bernhard’s friendship with Paul Wittgenstein (actually Ludwig’s first cousin once removed, but try making that work as a title) shows the infamously acid Austrian writer at his most personal. The book gives a moving and at times desperately exposing account of male friendship: “the most valuable relationship I have ever had with another man, the only one I have been able to endure for more than the briefest period”.

The Spare Room
Helen Garner
When a friend gave me a copy of Garner’s auto­biographical novel as a birthday present, I thought of cancer as something that happened to other people. By the time I had read it, it had happened twice to me. The Spare Room is largely taken up with Helen’s friend Nicola coming to Melbourne seeking an alternative therapy cure for her end-stage cancer. Garner’s account of this period, of the memorable beginning of their friendship drinking vodka on a jetty in the night, and of “the remains of her care” for Nicola, uses stark simplicity to reveal the desperate complexity of dying and of bearing witness to death.

Fever Dream
Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
A panic attack disguised as a novel, Fever Dream takes the form of a dialogue between Amanda, lying in hospital having lost her sight, and her friend Carla’s precocious young son, David – who Carla, as she previously told Amanda, thinks has been replaced by someone or something else. Meanwhile, where is Amanda’s daughter? While every book on this list benefits from being read in one go, Fever Dream is almost impossible to break away from before the final page is turned.

The Driver’s Seat
Muriel Spark
Lise, the main character in Spark’s still-shocking 1970 novel – her favourite of her works – is “neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her nose is short and wider than it will look in the likeness constructed partly by the method of identikit, partly by actual photography, soon to be published in the newspapers of four languages”. The book is a masterclass in telling readers they’re headed somewhere horrible and having them hope things will turn out OK despite knowing they won’t.

The Vegetarian
Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith
Long before she became a Nobel prize winner, Han made her English language debut with this, her fifth novel. Questions multiply as we read. Why is Yeong-hye’s husband so angry when she stops eating meat? What’s with the botanical obsession of her brother-in-law? And is it linked with her later desire to transform into a tree? Compelling either because of or despite its mysteriousness, Han’s novel – appropriately, given its obsessive return to the imagery of invaded bodies – sinks its roots deep in its readers’ minds.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Carlo Rovelli, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre
There is something breathtakingly simple in the way Carlo Rovelli, a physicist who originally wrote these short essays for an Italian newspaper, communicates ideas of the utmost complexity. Not that we come away from the book fully grasping general relativity, quantum gravity or the inelegance or otherwise of the Standard Model, but it helps us apprehend the awesome scope of the concepts it so elegantly outlines. And, unlike Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, at 79 pages you’ll actually finish it.

Lolly Willowes
Sylvia Townsend Warner
One of the true originals of 20th-century English literature, Townsend Warner’s writing career began with this deeply strange novel 100 years ago. It opens conventionally enough, with young, gentle Lolly quitting London for the country. Then it gleefully begins smashing together genres, some of which weren’t even codified in 1926. Nature writing, feminism (“women know they are dynamite”, Lolly proclaims), folk horror and more are churned together, with Satan featuring not as a mere concept, but a flesh-and-blood Chiltern gamekeeper.

Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
Just before the Christmas of 1985, the coalman Bill Furlong makes a shocking discovery in the “powerful-looking” convent that looms over his small Irish town. The church’s domination, and Furlong’s ability to defy it, is central to this spellbinding book. There’s a simplistic reading that positions it as a fable about a good man. It’s more complicated than that, and the question of what might happen in the days after Furlong’s decisive, perhaps foolhardy action, persists.

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Max Porter
Before Max Porter’s unique debut – part poem, novel, essay, play – became an unexpected sensation, publishers had grown resistant to short books. Without its example one can well imagine Samantha Harvey being told to go away and add 20,000 words to Orbital, her 140-page Booker prize winner. But Porter’s vivid, crackling story, in which a human-sized crow steps from the pages of Ted Hughes’s poetry and into the lives of a grieving family, puts the lie to the idea that short must mean insubstantial.

My earliest reading memory
Fairytales. I was obsessed. I took fairytales very seriously as moral lessons. I soon knew that I’d always help any old lady cross the road, it really is always best to do so.

My favourite book growing up
The Hobbit was my favourite book while growing up. It expanded my understanding of what could be achieved in fiction. I found JRR Tolkien’s world transformative. I felt as if I knew the hobbits, and I so wanted to see the elves. I could hear the crack of fireworks as they turned into dragons that flew overhead.

The writer who changed my mind
Maya Angelou taught me that I owed myself hope. No matter how painful or difficult it was. Her work has such dignity and light. I read all of her work for years and took as many lessons from it as I could. It made me want to step up and continue to try to find a way to create a life that mattered to me.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I was reading the dictionary when I was really quite little; if I found a word I didn’t know I would always go and look it up. Strange thing for a kid to do but I fell in love with language itself.

The book I came back to
I originally found Frankenstein by Mary Shelley too claustrophobic. In recent years I have connected with Shelley in a profound way and I am now writing a modern adaptation of Frankenstein that will be published next year. She was so ahead of her time, she began sci-fi, brought to life such a powerful archetype in the Creature, and while you can see inspirations of, say, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – he used to visit and read it at her father’s house – it was an absolutely personal calling for her to write this story. I am fascinated by her engagement with gnosis, the life force, death and how all the tragedies of her young life were carefully woven together by a formidable intellect. Shelley was only a teenager when she first wrote the book; interestingly, she revisited it and made revisions over decades. Like a master painter, perhaps, who adds a touch of shade and light later on, only to heighten a work’s immortal glow.

The book I reread
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is one of my favourite stories of all time. Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as an Ungeziefer, some kind of monstrous creature. I think it perfectly encapsulates the relationship between the individual and social structures.

The book I could never read again
Anything by Enid Blyton. Her work has not aged well.

The book I discovered later in life
When I was travelling in Egypt I read The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany and Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz. Both books are intertwined with my memories of staying in downtown Cairo.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess when I was 15 and living in a children’s home. Its protagonist, Alex, was the same age as me. I found the book shocking. The use of “nadsat” (teenage slang) as the language spoken by his “droogs” also showed me that there are many ways to innovate in a novel.

The book I am currently reading
Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir A Hymn to Life. I think she is extraordinary and inspiring.

My comfort read
Poetry: a single stanza in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, or The Man-Moth by Elizabeth Bishop, or Temptation by Nina Cassian. There are so many poems I return to endlessly, as with a favourite record that never fails to contain something familiar and new at the same time.

Sublimation by Isabel J Kim (Picador, £18.99)
This debut novel from an award-winning Korean-American short fiction writer is a fantastical reimagining of the immigrant experience. Here, anyone who crosses a border not intending to return creates an “instance”: a duplicate self who continues life at home. Reintegration into one body is possible, but after years of separate experiences, Soyoung wonders if it might be the psychological equivalent of murder. This idea shocks her friend Yujin, who speaks with his instance in New York every day, waiting for him to be granted the dual citizenship that will allow them to share a privileged life between two countries. The story of these two pairs is told in the second person, a destabilising choice that gradually immerses the reader in a world of doppelgangers. As in our reality, travel is hedged around with bureaucratic systems designed to codify identity and control immigration. A brilliantly realised, imaginative and compelling work of literary speculative fiction.

Last Day of a Prior Life byAndrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman (Scribe, £10.99)
The latest novel by the Spanish author of Such Small Hands is a gentler, more unusual approach to the ghost story. An estate agent encounters a child in the empty house she’s trying to sell, and realises she’s met a ghost. The experience causes her to think about her closest relationships and to act in ways she never has before. Knowing it could be dangerous, she goes back to the house, determined to try to help the child from another time who is trapped there. A short, subtle, eerie tale that hides depths beneath a surface simplicity.

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
The latest from the horror writer dips into the darker side of science fiction, imagining the development of a brain implant that allows the dead to walk. Julia has been hired to use something like a games control console to operate a man in a vegetative state, making his otherwise unresponsive body stand, walk, turn around and sit down. Her job is to conduct him from California to the east coast, supposedly so his final wishes will be honoured, and he’ll be able to legally die by his own choice. There’s nothing dignified about their jerky progress through airports and on planes, trying to avoid attracting attention to the man she calls Bernie and pretends is her stroke-disabled father walking under his own power. The creepy, dark humour in Julia’s side of the story is undercut by horror in chapters from the point of view of a man trapped in a body he cannot control, unable to remember his own name, but increasingly determined to escape and find answers. Things grow progressively more dangerous, the dread building to a mind-bending shocker of an ending.

The Carrier by Ruth Newton (Bantam, £18.99)
In this debut novel, a Carrier – always female – is someone paid to process another’s pain, relieving the customer from negative emotions such as jealousy, grief or anxiety. The mechanics don’t stand up to inspection, but as an allegory for our commercialised lives, and particularly the expectations of women’s emotional labour, it’s right on the nose. This cleverly plotted thriller shines a light on the way fortunes are made by inventing new addictions, and how easily unfair treatment may be hidden, or simply accepted. A thought-provoking read.

Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd (Macmillan, £16.99)
In present-day London, tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank launches his latest venture: commercial time travel. Only the super-rich can afford it, and the huge amount of energy required to keep a gateway to the past open for even a few minutes is hardly eco-friendly. Also, the past is not fixed. If visitors do something that could change the course of history, in even the smallest way, no one knows how it might affect the present. Visits to the 1940s are restricted to a few hours spent within walking distance of the London site. When the third tour returns minus one tourist and with another one badly injured, characters have the unsettling feeling that certain details in their own lives don’t match up with their memories. A clever, exciting time-travel thriller, filled with unexpected twists.

When Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved up her pocket money and bought herself a fan decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her favourite plaything, a prop to be used while dancing in imaginary music videos or recreating scenes from Gone With the Wind in which she cast herself as Scarlett O’Hara. “I lit up, animated, whenever that fan was in my hand,” she recalls in her memoir.

But when Cox, who was raised as a boy, began fanning herself with it at school, her teacher, Mrs Ridgeway, yanked her furiously out of the classroom, paraded her and her new accessory in front of the other teachers, and then phoned her mother, Gloria. When Gloria came home that evening, she exploded with fury. She said Mrs Ridgeway had told her she too had a son who had been an effeminate child who was now living on the streets of New Orleans and wearing a dress. “You want to be in a dress on the streets in New Orleans?” shouted Gloria, who would habitually call Cox a “sissy” and other homophobic slurs. She then signed her up for conversion therapy, which duly failed. It did, however, reinforce the message that there was something deeply wrong with Cox and that she was ultimately unlovable. Three years later, she tried to kill herself.

Transcendent is an immersive, eloquent and often harrowing account of the actor, presenter and LGBTQ+ campaigner’s struggles growing up gender nonconforming in the deep south. It also tells of her long and obstacle-strewn path to success. Prior to landing the role of Sophia Burset, an inmate in the prison drama Orange Is the New Black, Cox had spent more than 20 years living hand to mouth in New York while taking acting classes and attending endless auditions. Finding acceptance in an industry that habitually discriminated against women, non-binary and black people entailed dogged perseverance and many dark nights of the soul.

But the biggest battle in Transcendent plays out between Cox and her mother, whose cruel warnings about being down-and-out in New Orleans in a dress rang in her ears long into adulthood. Gloria never stopped telling Cox and her twin brother Lamar how disappointing they were, how she couldn’t afford them and they couldn’t do anything right. One day, at the end of her tether after Lamar and his friends put a stone through a neighbour’s window, she wordlessly took her children to the home of their father, who they’d never met, and dumped them in his kitchen with two suitcases. Inspecting his children, Cox Sr declared them “fucking freaks”. The following day, he had his wife deposit them at a police station from where they were transferred to an orphanage. They would stay there for a month before Gloria gave in and came to collect them.

All of this is relayed by Cox in a tone that feels less about getting even with her mother than a genuine attempt to understand and process her tyranny. We learn how Gloria endured severe financial hardship and had herself grown up in an abusive household. The author also gives her credit for agreeing to send both her children to the Alabama School of Fine Arts, where Cox specialised in dance and her brother in visual art, and which helped put both on the path to their respective careers.

Most striking of all is Cox’s sharp detailing of the loneliness and loss of freedom and trust that comes with being ostracised, mocked and physically attacked for being different. She describes the exhausting burden of being out and about as a gender non-conforming person, her senses permanently on high alert, scoping out strangers for signs of hostility. “If something felt weird,” she recalls, “I’d just start running. I didn’t need to find out what was up. I knew that my life was in danger.” Back in the safety of her apartment, that tension would quickly turn into despair.

Somehow, through all this, Laverne nurtures an inner defiance that leads her to embrace outre fashion, to begin strutting rather than scurrying down the street and, eventually, living life as a trans woman who raises awareness for others walking the same path. Hers is a story of resilience and rebellion – and that of a performer whose ultimate revenge for decades of abuse and rejection is success.

With its gods, monsters and dizzying scale, Homer’s the Odyssey is deemed by many to be unfilmable, though it hasn’t stopped directors from having a go, including Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster adaptation comes to cinemas next week. An audiobook would seem a smart choice, allowing listeners to deploy their imaginations to conjure dark sorcery, supernatural beasts and epic storms rather than leaning on CGI.

This classic recording, first published in 2006, is based on Ian Johnston’s much-admired translation. It is narrated by the Game of Thrones actor Anton Lesser, who brings gravitas and texture to this tale of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his efforts to get home after the 10-year Trojan War. Odysseus’s journey is fraught as he encounters the wrath of the sea god Poseidon in the form of a man-eating monster and a whirlpool that swallows ships. Then comes Calypso, the beautiful goddess-nymph and daughter of Atlas who keeps him on an island for seven years in the hope that he will stay as her husband.

Back in Ithaca, Odysseus’s wife Penelope – who doesn’t know if her husband is dead or alive – is being besieged by suitors, while their adult son Telemachus, who hasn’t seen his father since he was an infant, struggles to maintain order and embarks on various sojourns to track down him down. Then we’re with the gods on Olympus as they sit around arguing about which mortals they will aid and on which they will rain down hell and damnation. Will Odysseus make it home and, if he does, will he be welcome?

Available via Naxos, 12hr 45min

Further listening

Music as Medicine
Daniel Levitin, Penguin, 12hr 17min
A paean to the healing properties of music, Levitin’s book investigates the connections between music and the human body and brain and tests the argument for the use of music as medicine. Read by the author.

Butcher
Joyce Carol Oates, 4th Estate, 13hr 11min
A cast including Edoardo Ballerini, Cassandra Campbell and Amy Shiels star in this chilling fictional biography of a doctor who experiments on the female patients of a New Jersey lunatic asylum and becomes a leading light in gyno-psychiatry.

The summer of 1976 calls to my generation of novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the textures of daily life in that era, and a heatwave puts daily life under the kind of pressure that fuels fiction. In Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes’s first novel, Trouble Was, the scene is set by that heatwave with its attendant, escalating water shortage; the escalating marital and mental health crisis of the mother of three young children; a remote farm in the West Country. Though in some ways the pace is slow– not a criticism, the pace of school holidays with nowhere to go and nothing to do is also slow – the novel’s engines thrum from the first page.

Edwardes has taken the risk of a first-person child narrator, primary-aged Frank. Such figures are necessarily precocious – there’s a reason full-length novels by nine-year-olds are rarely written and never published – and tend to make demands on our suspension of disbelief, but in this case it’s convincing and compelling from the outset. The use of past tense helps, allowing both strikingly immediate observation and the feeling that the prose is in the steady hands of a remembering adult. Through the gap between Frank and the reader’s comprehension, the book conveys what the reader needs to understand about the adults’ lives. We know that most of the adults are also adulterers, that his mother’s mental illness is hereditary as well as situational, and that her efforts to fob off social services are just about adequate.

We meet Frank and his younger siblings, four-year-old Odette and toddler Patrick, in their mother’s smelly old car, packed in “so close it made my job of looking after us easier”. They’re driving through the night to the big farmhouse of their Aunt Perry, leaving home as many times before, for reasons Frank never really understands. Their father is away in the navy, but Frank’s memories of and longing for him are complicated: an adult reliably in charge when present, but also a volatile threat to his mother’s stability. In his absence, Frank is required to step in.

But the situation is, naturally, unmanageably complex. Aunt Perry is also raising her sons mostly in the absence of their father, albeit with private schools and a large house, and she too is unable or unwilling to meet children’s basic needs. Food is erratic and inadequate, water comes from a dirty well, there are maggots in the kitchen sink, pee all over the bathroom and nothing and no one is ever washed. Frank’s cousins are casually brutalised and brutal, given attention only in the form of humiliation and inconsistent punishment that they yearn to pass on. In Frank, Patrick and especially Odette, the cousins see scapegoats and victims.

The plot is the painfully inevitable deterioration of this scene. Inasmuch as there’s any consistent principle, basic parenting, for both mothers, is about “toughening up”. Frank’s mum tells him in response to a rare complaint about the cousins’ bullying of Patrick, “If you want to survive in this world, you have to put up with it … put up and shut up.” She calls Odette “Pudding” and sings to her that she’s big and fat, until Odette howls and is scolded for being too sensitive. She slaps Frank for twisting his hands when he’s upset, tells him not to shake his head because “you look deranged”. Though Aunt Perry is meant to be the responsible adult when Mum can’t get out of bed or is in hospital, she punishes the children until they learn not to ask for help, whether medical attention for a convulsing toddler, information about their parents’ whereabouts or protection from predatory cousins.

Edwardes has been a war correspondent, and is excellent at the small detail that tells a terrible story. She knows when looking away is more effective than a full frontal description, and how to haunt readers without sensationalism. If all this sounds grim and disturbing, it is, not least because of the mundanity of domestic squalor and the incremental worsening of Mum’s health, the cousins’ malice and the effects of the heatwave. Like the building of a thunderstorm through a sultry day, the story makes us wait for resolution, for justice and vindication, for some kind of happy ending.

I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that as often, the commitment to realism that makes this book also makes the ending difficult to deliver. There can be no cheerful resolution for children whose carers don’t care, and Edwardes has been too true to that position to betray it for a fairytale conclusion. Her solution is, like the rest of her writing, elegant. Though the rain falls at the end, there’s no cleansing storm and you don’t get to pretend the pain is washed away. The joy here is that of good writing.

There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and that the story belong to the writer’s (and reader’s) “own day”. In Lauren Mooney’s sharply observed debut novel, Danielle lives a precarious existence as a PA at a dilettante arts charity called Hodgepodge (strapline: “for ideas”). She types emails, makes tea and increasingly finds herself running personal errands for her monstrous boss Jeannie. Jeannie seems to see no difference between working for the charity, and working for her.

After a horrible breakup, Danielle finds herself unexpectedly homeless. With no savings, no bank of Mum and Dad, and no room left in her overdraft, she winds up staying alone in Jeannie’s ancestral home, a rambling pile in the middle of nowhere. “We could do with somebody to take care of the place,” Jeannie says, as Danielle bursts into uncharacteristic tears. “You’d be doing us a huge favour.”

Westerley has obvious antecedents: Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or Susan Hill’s Eel Marsh House, with their rooms shrouded in dust sheets and locked doors with no keys. All at Westerley is, of course, not as it seems: Danielle, alone in the house and miles from anywhere, finds a fresh bowl of peaches on the sideboard; sees a face at the window; wakes to find herself somewhere – or somewhen – else entirely. She hears hobnailed boots on the stairs; finds herself reaching for a calico apron that doesn’t exist.

Danielle sleeps at first in the master bedroom, but when Jeannie arrives unexpectedly – trailing her equally appalling son, Edward – she moves, of course, into the servants’ quarters. Soon, Danielle is rising at dawn, cleaning up after Jeannie and Edward, bringing afternoon tea up to the drawing room. As past and present blur, so too do the lines between 21st-century employee and 19th-century maid­servant. Didn’t she always bring Jeannie a green tea in the office? And didn’t Jeannie, after all, ask her to “take care of the place”?

Service is resolutely a book of the present day: of the housing crisis, of the unsteady nature of a life in the arts without family backing, of broken phones and bad wifi. Yet Mooney’s timeslip of a novel makes it clear how timeless some things actually are: loneliness, poverty, aspirations, the feeling of toiling for somebody, for something, for no other reason than the order of your birth, the precariousness with which one must tiptoe between deference and degradation, the effort to retain a sense of self in the face of a world that believes you – subtly or otherwise – to be lesser.

Attempting a seduction with assault-adjacent undertones, rapacious Edward announces that he is Upstairs, Wooster and, er, Downton, whereas Danielle is Downstairs, Jeeves, and … Abbey. “It’s a joke, Jesus. You work for my mum, so you’re the staff? I was joking.” Alone in the drawing room with the young master of the house, Danielle – or, perhaps, her ghostly counterpart – has no idea what to do, or how to escape.

The hauntings of Service are genuinely chilling. And yet equally chilling is the real world in which so many Danielles have lived. How many Edwards, for how many years, carried out their “seduction” with no consequences? How many poor girls have suffered worse with the threat of homelessness and penury hanging over them? The book, in places, can feel a little heavy-handed. Mooney might have trusted the reader more – or, perhaps, her own writing. The meticulous evisceration of the class system stands by itself. The charge that drives the book, then, is how little has changed in over 100 years. Or, perhaps, how little ever changes.

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