The premise of Séamas O’Reilly’s brilliant debut novel is that a Hollywood actor has flown into Derry to star in a new TV series about the Troubles called Dead City, then mysteriously disappeared. But its real interest lies in what happens when a place becomes defined by a particular historical moment, to the extent that stories told about it lapse into formula. As one character says of the TV series: “A young lad coming of age in a time of violence, will he get caught up in everything or find another way through blah blah blah.”

O’Reilly is determined to show us that the people of Derry are not so easily stereotyped. He uses Dead City as a starting point to circle through different characters connected to the series, from a stressed scriptwriter to a local historian who wonders, “How do you talk about the past as a person still living it, in a place that barely survived it?” As we move through the novel, we discover the links between them, creating a patchwork portrait of the city, similar to the way Tommy Orange’s novel There, There used a chorus of voices to explore the lives of Native Americans.

Each character talks to us directly. “The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving,” says Dympna: people hope it will boost the economy “like Thrones did for Belfast”. Dympna’s daughter wants to audition and is quizzing her about the 1970s, “like some fella from the UN on a fact-finding mission”, while Dympna remembers the things she’s hidden from her children. “I wondered there and then if awareness is all it’s cracked up to be if you can’t tell the whole story.”

Who tells the story and why they tell it is a central concern, though O’Reilly’s lightness of touch means it never seems overdone. He has a keen eye for absurdities, for the way tragedy becomes marketable: the artist who daubed murals on Bogside walls now doing lecture tours with a “wee moustache and crucifix earring like a plastic Provo”; the ex-IRA hitman offering his services as a “consultant”. Those once bound by a code of silence are happy to demonstrate how to make a bottle bomb. “Say Nothing my arse,” says one character.

Economic necessity means people take work that perpetuates the cliches. Local painters are hired to recreate an old mural for the film set. “I can do the gunman, you can start with the dove,” says one. “If I do another dove as long as I live, God help me.” Aspiring actor Turlough says: “This crock of shite is the only chance I have of getting out of here.”

The locals note it’s mainly Americans and Brits working on the series: Americans who sentimentalise their Irish links – one of the theories about the missing star is that she’s “gone native like a load of Yanks do” – and Brits who “treat their own violence like the hiccups, something mad and terrible that was happening for some mysterious reason”. But there’s also Eileen, who is hopeful her home will be used as a filming location so she can pay for a new extension, watching the production crew examine her ornaments like “artefacts they pulled from a bog”.

This recreation and commodification of the past is a kind of haunting. The novel is run through with the different ways in which the dead are inescapable. Ann-Marie’s son was shot by a British soldier, his image now endlessly reproduced on book covers and “bloody tea-towels”. With her cold rage and her clear articulation of the unfixable contradictions of grief – “My heart is small and hard, wind-bleached like seaside beach seats” – Ann-Marie is one of the novel’s most powerful voices. Reflecting on the lads who came home safely after her son was killed, she says: “It wasn’t their fault and I’ll never forgive them.”

O’Reilly’s first book, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, was a heartbreakingly funny memoir about his mother’s death, and he clearly has a rare gift for moving nimbly between oppositions. The humour of Prestige Drama is skilfully weaponised: it allows O’Reilly to go after subjects that we often tiptoe around. And his language is gloriously vivid: a hungover man wakes up “slowly, like a column of dog food muscling its way out of a tin”.

Some may feel the missing actor thread should have had more prominence, but Prestige Drama is more interested in the ordinary people behind the televised version of events. James Plunkett, author of the 1969 novel Strumpet City, another polyphonic book about an Irish city, explained his novel’s success by saying he “didn’t lift my eye away from people at any stage, didn’t lift my eye away from the parish … for the whole of life is in that parish, where else can it be”.

It is the summer of 2019, and Sophie Evans, the reckless protagonist of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s unsettling second novel, has arrived on an idyllic island in the Cyclades with her university friends Helena, Iris and Alessia to celebrate Helena’s forthcoming marriage. Helena doesn’t want it called her “hen … Like we’re dumpy little featherbrains going cluck, cluck, cluck”, but all the same, the men – including Sophie’s curator boyfriend of six years, Greg – will not arrive for another five days.

She may be on holiday but Sophie is not at ease in the villa’s atmosphere of “almost offensive” good taste, with luxurious meals, cocktails on tap and endless sunshine. In the 10 years that have passed since they first met as students, the differences between the women have become more pronounced: money has “made itself known”. Elegant, chilly Iris, whose parents have bought her a place in Peckham, works in publishing; the family of spoilt, patrician art dealer Alessia seem practically to own the island on which the women are holidaying; and Helena’s aspiration is to be a trophy wife with a house full of “nice things”.

By contrast, Sophie – whose father is an electrician and mother the full-time carer for her disabled sister – is working in a museum shop while she tries to make her way as an artist. She is also under pressure from her reliable, thoughtful partner, Greg, to have a baby, when what she urgently wants is freedom to paint. Apparently understanding this, Alessia commissions a nude portrait from Sophie, to be painted during their time on the island in her private studio. But when the beautiful Ky, waiter, archaeologist and extraordinary lover, appears at the villa and begins to look at Sophie in a certain way, the rivalries that have been simmering turn toxic, and unease becomes something more dangerous.

As Sophie wrestles to reconcile what she wants, what she needs as an artist and what is acceptable in polite society, it becomes clear that this account is written with long hindsight from far into a shadowy future. The island narrative is punctuated at regular intervals by brief passages in which Sophie engages with female artists from history, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Francesca Woodman, deconstructing their experience as she stands in front of their work in museums and galleries down the succeeding years and setting it against her own struggle to find fulfilment as a painter. We skip to and fro between these meditations and the dance of the characters in their Greek idyll, moving towards the arrival of the men, and the certainty of disaster.

Female, Nude is an energetic and ambitious novel. Cosslett – a Guardian columnist – is excellent at the sensual detail of light and food and physical pleasure; she immediately engages us with a seductive drama of friendship between women in an exotic and glamorous White Lotus-like location, while at the same time offering a serious-minded interrogation of art. Add in an unpicking of the complex burden that is motherhood and the trade-offs a woman must make with her body and society if she is also to find creative fulfilment, and it’s not entirely surprising that the triple threads sometimes become unmanageable.

The artistic analyses are interesting but inevitably feel clunky, as though parachuted in to provide a gravitas that the millennials-on-a-hen-week narrative rejects. It is less easy to believe, too, in the wise and weary future Sophie these passages offer us than in the messy, resentful 31-year-old, lashing out at her frenemies on their Greek idyll, ravenously solipsistic, ruthless and selfish – entirely convincing as an artist in the making, in other words, and as watchable as she is unlikable.

The characterisation more generally is a little uneven: while her husband-to-be is splendidly unpleasant, bridezilla Helena is no more than serviceable, Iris the ice queen not far from a cipher and her partner Edwin almost entirely theoretical. But if Ky is pure romantic fantasy, the novel gives Sophie a delightfully free rein with him that makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read – just as Cosslett’s seriousness of intent must also inspire respect.

It’s 1843, and along with hundreds of his fellow ministers, Reverend John Ferguson has broken away from the Church of Scotland to form a new denomination. His zeal is dented only by the worldly question of how he and his wife, Mary, are to survive without his stipend, which is why he agrees to sail to a tiny island halfway to Norway. Dispatched with scanty provisions and a pistol, he must inform its lone inhabitant, a crofter named Ivar, that he’s to be evicted as part of the Highland Clearances.

So begins Carys Davies’s third novel, Clear. But while the story is set in motion by two mighty upheavals in Scottish history, the book’s driving source of fascination – language itself – is revealed only once John reaches the island.

Shortly after arriving, John takes a bad tumble off a high, rocky path. He’s found, barely conscious, by hulking, straw-haired Ivar who, relieved of his long solitariness, chooses not to speculate about this pale stranger’s intentions. They have no common tongue, but slowly, as John recovers, he begins piecing together a glossary of Ivar’s vocabulary.

Davies borrows from Norn, a vanished language once spoken on the islands of Orkney and Shetland, whose specificities it evolved to pin down. There are many words, for instance, to describe stormy seas (gilgal, skreul, pulter, yog) and gradations of grey (emskit, dombet, broget).

Her own language is a marvel of eloquent restraint, as when a ray of sunlight falls in Ivar’s bothy “in a slowly turning, glittering column of chaff and fish scales and wisps of floating wool”. Ivar’s entire hard yet transcendent life is there.

But what of John’s mission? What of his pistol? On occasion, this intimate, lean three-hander seems ready to lurch towards melodrama, but it always pulls back. If there’s a flaw, it lies in the characterisation of Mary, aged 43 and a late bride, but otherwise overly determined by two other snippets of history whose quirkiness swamps any nascent sense of her: the advent of false teeth and the Comrie earthquakes.

And yet it’s Mary, growing anxious on the mainland, whose bold actions will carry Davies’s memorable novel to its unexpected, delicately radical end – an end that conjures new, shared beginnings in which John’s growing list of words becomes “like a prayer, or a gentle weather forecast”.