By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek “eu-topos”, meaning good place, and “ou-topos”, meaning not a place at all. It might have been a compact warning that one should never attempt to turn utopias into reality. Those who have tried usually witnessed the model societies they founded devolving into grungily dysfunctional communes, weird sex cults, or both.

In this richly diverting intellectual history of the idea, we begin, as we must, with Plato, and the zany prescriptions of his Republic (“we should neutralise the poets’ influence on mothers”). Passing in silence over the potentially utopian aspects of Jesus’s thinking, we arrive at More’s utopia, where “nothing is private”, and so “the common affairs be earnestly looked upon”. The great Renaissance scientist Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a utopia of rational scientific experimentation – which, Wren suggests ingeniously, might have inspired Wakanda in the Marvel Black Panther films. The 17th-century duchess Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World imagines the author as a goddess elected by a world of human-animal hybrids who like science. In the 18th century, Sarah Scott’s Millenium [sic] Hall imagined an ideal society of women without men, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland during the first world war.

Some patterns emerge: many utopias employ a framing device in which the narrator is accidentally or fantastically transported to a new land, and then subjected to reams of expository monologue about how it all works. Families are often abolished, with children raised in common. And in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, Wren explains straightfacedly, “there are no law schools or lawyers, abolished here as in most utopias”.

Families are allowed, though, in Voyage en Icarie, by the 19th-century French socialist Étienne Cabet, which envisions a sternly regimented communism. In 1849 Cabet founded his own model society, Icaria, in Illinois. Alas, after a few years, “Cabet’s citizens were hoarding possessions; they indulged in vices including hunting and fishing, swearing, tobacco and alcohol; the women wore makeup, jewellery and perfume.” Cabet’s solution to this disgraceful state of affairs was to insist on even stricter rules, and to make himself president “for four years instead of one”. Just so does utopia always threaten to turn into dictatorship.

It is odd, then, that Wren never mentions a famous reckoning with the concept of utopia. In 1974, the American political philosopher Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which argues that the only morally permissible state is a “minimal” one that guarantees property rights and security, and enforces contracts. People should be free to build whatever forms of association they like on top of that, as long as membership is never coerced. But for Nozick utopias are always coercive because not everyone will agree freely with their values. “It is helpful to imagine cavemen sitting together to think up what, for all time, will be the best possible society and then setting out to institute it,” Nozick writes. “Do none of the reasons that make you smile at this apply to us?”

Many features of the utopias in Wren’s splendid catalogue, after all, are rather sad. In Gilman’s Moving the Mountain, “There are almost no pets, as they’re wasteful.” In Voyage en Icarie, “The decorative prints are full of useful information, as opposed to pointless landscape paintings.” HG Wells’s A Modern Utopia of 1905 describes an elite “samurai” class, his society’s natural nobility, who “must not act or sing … they can’t play or watch competitive sport.”

But inasmuch as utopias are primarily “organic machines for thinking about the premises of our thought”, Wren argues, they are more like science fiction – and some indeed have been science fiction. He mentions here the 1970s “anarchist utopia” of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but probably the most popular strain of utopian fiction over the last few decades has been the epic series of Culture novels by Iain M Banks, which posits fully automated luxury communism in space among a pan-galactic society of augmented humans.

Still, things regularly go awry in this ideal society, from attack by intolerant fanatics, to rogue AI utilitarianism, or unfeasibly ancient alien artefacts. The best utopian fiction therefore ends up implicitly anti-utopian as well; at its highest level of practise, perhaps, utopia vanishes into the great flow of literature itself.

The Uses of Utopia by Joad Raymond Wren is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of the modern age (the book’s first few stories, of 17th-century men and women having to prove they were disabled enough to receive parish support to avoid starvation, will be familiar to anyone who has tried to claim the personal independence payment). And second, that absolutely everything has changed – from the closing of asylums to the advent of prosthetics to the eventual, belated enshrining of disability rights in law.

But the central argument of Disability helps to reconcile these two narratives into a coherent whole. Turner, a professor at Swansea University, shows that while public and political attitudes to disability have remained poor, disabled people have challenged them at every stage, wresting progress out of even the most unpromising circumstances. This is not a story of rights and dignity bestowed from on high, but of the people and communities clawing them into being.

The sweeping perspective is anchored by incredible personal stories. We meet Duncan Campbell, an aristocrat who, at the turn of the 18th century, became a sensation as a deaf psychic, trading on myth and rumour relating to his disability to boost his fame and credibility at a time when deafness was equated with being childlike and ineducable. Or, two centuries later, May Billinghurst, the infamous “cripple suffragette” who used her bespoke hand-operated tricycle to break through police lines and commit acts of civil disobedience. Or, later still, Megan du Boisson, a 1960s housewife who campaigned for the first disability benefits awarded solely on the basis of impairment, when existing schemes only covered those injured at work or in war, leaving out almost all disabled women.

What they, alongside many others in the book, have in common is that they not only resisted the material limitations society imposed on them, but also rejected the assumptions that went with them. The cumulative picture is therefore not of a downtrodden minority but one defined by ingenuity, determination and grit. This may be a new perspective for many nondisabled readers, but members of the community will find themselves recognising the attributes of they and their friends in people who lived hundreds of years ago. It is welcome to see this understanding of disability so well articulated in a book for a general audience.

One sign of the devaluing of disability activism and history is the fact that none of the personalities in the book are household names. May Billinghurst surely deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the Pankhursts, and we ought to know that it was Vic Finkelstein, an anti-apartheid activist who applied what he had learned in South Africa to the UK disability rights movement, who first articulated what would become known as the social model of disability in the early 1970s, paving the way for activism that went far beyond calls for better financial support.

We should know, too, the name of 18th-century MP William Hay, whom Turner describes as the first person to write about disability as a personal identity, just as we should know the names of Barbara Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth, the punk couple who kickstarted the successful 1980s and 90s campaign for the UK’s first comprehensive disability rights law. All fought loud battles with governments and societies that wanted them to be quiet. Hopefully this book goes some way to giving them the status – and voice – they deserve.

In showing how disabled people throughout history have rejected the narratives foisted upon them, Turner in turn rejects another false narrative: that disabled people are passive recipients of both discrimination and help. This book tells another, truer story: that we have always resisted and always fought to make things better.

The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill, £16.99)
In the eponymous Mumbai apartment block, the immensely rich and those who serve them exist side by side but worlds apart. Fading American actor George Abercrombie, married to superstar Sweety Sahota, finds himself advertising Indian whiskey while his younger wife’s acting career continues its stellar trajectory. Waking on the sofa with a hangover and only hazy memories of the night before, George discovers Sweety stabbed to death in the marital bed and one of his shirts, blood-stained, in the laundry basket. He knows he will be the prime suspect, but not only have Sweety’s phone and laptop disappeared, so has his assistant, Amit … Told from the points of view of George, Amit and Sweety’s put-upon PA Gemma – with Amit and Gemma both having secrets of their own – and laced with dry humour and social commentary, this is a tense, fast-paced tale of class, power and corruption.

A Violent Masterpiece by Jordan Harper (Faber, £9.99)
Set in LA, award-winning American novelist Harper’s latest novel is a dark and topical tale. Jake, who livestreams crime scenes to an audience hungry for sensation, is currently tapping into the market for serial killer nostalgia with episodes on the LA Ripper, “up to three victims and counting”. Kara works for Sub Rosa, a concierge service that provides the very rich with whatever they desire, legal or otherwise. And Gibson is a public defence lawyer who reluctantly agrees to act for a wealthy predator who threatens to bring down “the pillars of this whole goddamn town”, including Sub Rosa’s clients, before apparently killing himself in his cell. When Kara’s colleague goes missing and she suspects it’s the work of the Ripper, the three protagonists’ worlds converge. Told in apocalyptic language, there are shades of both James Ellroy and Tom Wolfe in this story of greed in all its forms, played out in an intense, chaotic and thoroughly amoral world.

Murder on the Red River by Marcie R Rendon (Viper, £9.99)
Native American playwright and poet Rendon’s debut novel is set in 1970, on the North Dakota/Minnesota border. Cash Blackbear, a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman, is a farm worker, her evenings spent playing pool for beer money. Her world is one of low expectations, limited opportunities, poverty and alcoholism; a hardscrabble childhood with a series of foster families has made her self-reliant, her only real friend being Sheriff Wheaton, who has tried to look out for her since she was “legally kidnapped” from her mother and siblings. When an Ojibwe man is murdered, she helps to gather intelligence for Wheaton’s investigation, putting herself at risk. Beautifully written, with an appealing central character, this is the first novel in a projected series; Rendon prepares the ground well, focusing as much on the larger, systemic crimes committed against the Native American people, such as the forcible removal of children from their families, as on the individual investigation. More, please.

The Devoted by Catherine Cho (4th Estate, £16.99)
There’s more generational trauma and limited choice in Cho’s Hong Kong-set debut novel, this time among the rich and powerful. As the daughter of a key player in the Triad crime syndicate, the narrator Eunha has her life mapped out for her, but her pampered existence as a “tai tai” (wealthy wife) comes to an end when her young son is kidnapped and, despite his safe recovery, she is judged not fit to look after him any more. It is only when she steps away from her safe haven and takes a job as a nightclub hostess that she starts on the long road to understanding the extent to which not only she, but other family members, have been caught up in the machinations of her father’s criminal world. Told in chapters alternating between present and past, this is a moving story of secrets, betrayal and how women are denied agency: The Godfather, seen through a female eye.

The Repentants by Kate Foster (Mantle, £18.99)
Foster’s fourth historical mystery begins in 1790, in St Monans on the east coast of Scotland, where the Rev Mitchell is determined to keep his flock on the straight and narrow. When Florrie Aitken, the underappreciated wife of important local businessman Jonny, is caught with a lover, she is forced into a humiliating public act of repentance; there she encounters Eliza Wood, similarly punished for failing to attend church. Eliza is one of Jonny’s indentured labourers, with no choice but to work for him – first harvesting sea salt then, when Florrie accompanies Jonny to Iceland where he hopes to expand his operation using British prisoners from the hulk in Reykjavík harbour as labour, as their servant. As Jonny plans revenge on his wife, a bond forms between the two women – both, in their different ways, as captive as the men on the prison ship – who begin to plot their escape. Intelligent, atmospheric 18th-century domestic noir.

The plot of A Little Bit Bad sounds like the setup for a joke: “Like, this white lady lusting after her hot Chicano roofer?” Perdita Jungfrau, the narrator, is describing her own situation. “Yuck.”

It’s 2009 and Perdita is 39 when she meets 25-year-old Nando, who is working on next door’s roof. “Burned out” after a decade as a hospital social worker, she’s a stay-at-home mother to a toddler, and pregnant again (though she doesn’t know it yet). She isn’t happy. Her husband is critical of her for quitting her job, and won’t look after the children: “Babies scare me!” Perdita is out in her San Diego backyard on the day that Nando falls from a ladder propped up against the neighbour’s house. She sees it happen, calls an ambulance and sits beside him on the grass to wait.

“You know when someone is either handsome or wild-looking, and you don’t know which it is?” Nando’s face is freckled, with two little bumps where his nose has been broken twice. He describes himself as an “anarcho-Marxist” and is “opinionated in a calm, deadpan way”. He reads The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon on his lunch break, but has “somehow missed out” on college and is struggling to make a living in the post-crash economy.

Perdita and Nando should make an odd couple, but they don’t. They’re both raw and fragile, and they share a sense of delight in the abyss. (When Perdita’s son bites the face of another child at toddler group, Nando totally gets it: “He just likes the taste of human flesh”.) Their attraction feels real – there’s a sense of something tense and secret between them when they’re alone. When their differences come between them, that also feels realistic.

A Little Bit Bad is the debut novel from New Yorker Neyenesch. It’s released in the wake of Miranda July’s very successful All Fours, another story of a middle-aged California wife who discovers an intense desire for a younger man, and absconds. Where July’s novel concentrates on the “unleashed life” of the perimenopausal woman, Neyenesch’s takes a different turn. A second plot strand, set one year on in 2010, runs in parallel to the story of the affair. Nando has been murdered, and Perdita is trying to solve the case (she’s devastated, and also a fan of true crime).

Like All Fours, A Little Bit Bad has a careering plotline, flying between the everyday drudgery of mom-life, and a heightened, surreal or imagistic mode. My favourite character is an owl with the face of a woman who appears occasionally to Perdita and addresses her in the voice of the man who works at the local pawn shop. Beyond or via their fictional flights of fancy, All Fours is concerned with the politics of biology and the “true self” of a woman in midlife, whereas A Little Bit Bad is more interested in societal injustice. The military-industrial complex, the “good Obamaverse” and the carceral system all feature. At its sharpest, the novel poses questions about the structural violence of a culture that privileges the normative nuclear family. To some extent, it pulls back from a focus on the middle-class mother to ask who really feels that violence.

It’s also very funny. I was reminded of the heroines of Halle Butler’s novels – Perdita could be their older sister, another ferocious dork with a genius for behaving inappropriately. (Of course her son bites faces.) Neyenesch’s comic excellence and sharp insight occasionally come at the cost of blunter things, such as emotion. When Nando falls off the ladder and lies on the ground between life and death, Perdita, kneeling beside him, sees the blood coming out of him as “exit-sign red”. There’s something here that could be felt by the reader as serious, but the narrative chooses a smart humour, and those feelings never get too close.

There were points at which I wondered whether Neyenesch was deliberately satirising All Fours, or more broadly the trend for frantic fictional celebrations of older women going rogue. Certainly, she is having a laugh with California-flavoured ideas about self-expression. One chapter is wonderfully titled “The Roofer Holds Space for My Feelings”.

At heart, this story is tragic. The touch of satire pulls it back from the abyss, and it’s probably for the best. I absolutely enjoyed every single page. The plot is constructed for compulsive reading: the two storylines are told in interspersed chapters, and as the affair begins to cool, the murder mystery gets going. The central couple are sparkling and adorable. At an open-mic night on their first date they get up on stage. Perdita raps, while Nando, at her side, does “an Irish clog dance”. The audience is delighted.

It is a decade since Olivia Laing published The Lonely City, a blend of memoir and cultural analysis on the isolation of urban living. Laing – who is non-binary – had moved to Manhattan following a love affair that ended abruptly. Once there, they were taken aback at their feelings of isolation. Laing discovered “you can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people”.

The author’s attempts to navigate these difficult feelings are threaded through a series of artist portraits examining the connection between loneliness and creativity. There is Edward Hopper, famed for his paintings featuring lone figures seated in cafes and diners, and Henry Darger, the janitor and hospital worker who lived alone and achieved posthumous fame through his disturbing and hallucinatory paintings of misfits. Laing also ponders the work of Andy Warhol, who surrounded himself with people while still keeping them at arm’s length, and David Wojnarowicz, the American artist and photographer who documented the devastation caused by the Aids virus. His work, Laing notes, “did more than anything to release me from the burden of feeling that in my solitude I was shamefully alone”.

Actor Tilda Swinton is the narrator for this new recording marking the book’s tenth anniversary. Her reading (her first for an audiobook) is sharp yet reflective, tinged with curiosity and melancholy. Laing, who now lives in Suffolk, reads a new afterword in which she notes how loneliness is “a part of being human: isolated in a body, condemned to live inside time. No one is truly immune to loneliness and what really matters is what we do with it and where it takes us.”

Available via Canongate Books, 9hr 36min

Further listening

Cursed Daughters
Oyinkan Braithwaite, WF Howes, 9hr 24min
Three readers – Weruche Opia, Diana Yekinni and Nnei Opia Clark – tackle this multigenerational novel which tells of a curse passed down through the women in a single family, consigning each to a life of heartbreak and loneliness.

Always Winning
Ashley Walters, Transworld Digital, 6hr 43min
This memoir from the star of Adolescence and Top Boy finds him reflecting on his beginnings on a council estate in Peckham, south-east London; his teenage flirtation with gang violence; his time in UK rap collective So Solid Crew and his flourishing career as an actor and director. Read by the author.

At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy (2017), and again in Change (2024), he wrote about being the promising child of a poor family, the bullied gay son who became a bestselling author. Several of his other books have offered sympathetic sociological portraits of his parents: a father destroyed by physical labour, a victim of French healthcare and housing subsidy cutbacks, and a mother who, after raising numerous children in poverty, fled first Louis’s father and then, in Monique Escapes, published earlier this year, his abusive successor. Now, in Collapse, translated by novelist Tash Aw, Louis describes his eldest brother’s death, at 38, from complications relating to alcoholism.

“I felt nothing at the announcement of the death of my brother,” he begins; “not sadness or despair or joy or pleasure.” The reasons for his coldness soon become clear. His brother was violently homophobic. His drinking at one point prevented Louis from sleeping ahead of a crucial exam. After The End of Eddy came out, his brother went looking for him with a baseball bat. So when Louis talks with his mother and sister about how to pay for his brother’s funeral and admits, “yes, I would have let him be buried like a dog”, we understand why.

Collapse takes the form of a metaphysical inquest into the brother’s decline. Louis has said that the book was in various drafts a play, a diary and a manifesto – experiments that can all be glimpsed in the final product, which is a self-conscious hodgepodge of forms including witness testimony, a scripted dialogue between the author and his brother’s ghost and key scenes presented as numbered facts.

Long-term readers of Louis will be familiar with his tentative political diagnosis. His brother, ensnared in a vortex of negative social forces, stood no chance. “Your brother was above all else a victim of alcoholism,” a friend tells him. “It’s the narrative of a class destiny that you’re telling before anything else,” suggests another. But these conclusions are too pat for Louis. “My friends have clear ideas yet I don’t know, I don’t know,” he writes.

Reaching for fresh perspectives, he turns to literature: Catullus, Freud, Foucault, Joan Didion. His reading helps Louis find the distance he needs to think of his brother in new ways, and over the course of Collapse he gradually re-emerges as a kind of tragically ennobled figure. Louis describes his life in terms of “Destiny” and “Injustice” and writes of his brother’s “Wound”, a word that evokes not just the psychoanalytic work he cites but the incurable injury of Amfortas, pierced by the Holy Spear, in Wagner’s Parsifal. Though more mundane in provenance, Louis’s brother’s Wound is equally insurmountable.

The Wound is triggered by the divorce of the boy’s parents – he and Louis share a mother but have different fathers – and intensified by his father’s rejection and early death, also from alcoholism. Louis’s mother remembers a drawing his brother made as a child of “a river of blood, she never forgot the bodies or coffins that floated on the surface of an imaginary river”. The hurt never leaves. He distrusts the women he’s with; he blames his drinking on his humiliations. The Wound is a tragic flaw, an unconquerable inhibitor. “My brother’s life resembled the infinitely repeating image of a body struggling in quicksand,” Louis writes. At his death, his mother physically collapses – an operatic gesture entirely congruent with the emerging tragic scene.

Read in tandem with Monique Escapes, Louis’s latest reveals itself as the dark half of an equation that also has a more hopeful side. While his brother was unable to escape the cycle in which he was ensnared and it took his death to make a kind of redemptive sense of his life, Louis’s mother Monique has proved capable of forgiveness and growth. She sees in her son’s work how literature can be not just a form of revenge, indicting a person at their worst, but also liberating. Indeed, her escapes, as chronicled by her son, are enabled in part by his literary success – it’s to his Parisian apartment she flees; it’s the money from his writing that sets her up in her own house.

But most importantly, she retains a sense of her own destiny. “Through her, I’ve discovered the pleasure of writing in the service of someone else,” Louis remarks at the end of Monique Escapes. “I’ve become acquainted with the delight that accompanies disappearance, self-effacement, becoming just a glimpse into the story of a destiny other than my own … Nothing in literature has ever given me so much joy.” Though Louis has said that Collapse marks a close to writing his family saga, it’s hard to believe we’ve seen the end of Monique.

The last day of maternity leave, and an unnamed mother of two decides to stage a “yes day”, full of treats and good feelings. Of course it does not go according to plan: the treats are deficient, misjudged and underappreciated; the good feelings are fleeting, quickly upstaged by anxiety, guilt or humiliation. This familiar-sounding scenario is the simple yet bracing premise of Lisa Owens’s second novel, following her impressive first comic fiction of female-centred modernity, 2016’s Not Working.

The academic E Ann Kaplan once wrote that “motherhood is the major emotional experience of my adult life” – certainly a relatable observation, and reason enough why some writers may swerve going through the experience altogether. But when using it as narrative material, the aim is to render the cluttered yet lonely planet of motherhood in some new way, drawing on the energies of honesty and idiosyncrasy to frame a common, universal adventure as something singular and memorable.

The day begins at 5am, when Felix is woken by his baby brother Rudy, sending the “Three Musketeers” – mother and her two boys – down to the kitchen for a “special” breakfast. The father and husband, also unnamed, is away at a health-tech conference in Barcelona, and remains a shadowy, loaded presence throughout the novel, the focus of various “differently shaped parcels of resentment” including suspicions of adultery and gaslighting, depending on his wife’s experience at any given moment. To wider society – doctors, cashiers – she does have a name: “Mum”, which is how she is referred to during a sticky moment in a shop where Felix has a violent tantrum, and later during the medical emergency which takes over the second half of the book. This blanketing, anonymous term of address is an example of the achingly exact realism Owens achieves in her account, in which a woman’s identity is usurped by the immediate existential requirements of her children; she becomes “a flat, rudimentary approximation of a person, lacking in nuance or finesse”.

It’s the people closely surrounding “Mum” who embody the bold colours and textures of the novel’s precision. Her retired parents are deftly drawn, at once playful and commanding in a crisis, while the children themselves are full of life and entertainment, springing off the page in their convincing rambunctiousness, and also in how much they are loved. The cruel moments of maternal battering, such as “Felix’s bike pedal brutalising her shins every few metres” as she is pushing the buggy in the rain, sit movingly alongside lasting observational description: the little boy’s equal capacity for rage and forgiveness, “a marshmallow of love in his puffy winter coat”. It’s not easy to get children right in novels, but when it is done well they become a winning literary charm.

As we follow the Three Musketeers through the trials of their day, there are occasions where the minutiae of parenthood become perhaps too precise, too involved, and we are taken too thoroughly into logistics, such as the details of acquiring baby paraphernalia from Gumtree and the exact contents of a fridge. This gives Natural Disaster a slightly plodding effect, but it is also, it could be argued, a feature of its realism: the slowing of time that motherhood can bring about, the yawning length of a day that can in turn slow one’s thoughts to fixate on the mundane and prosaic while the “active” world rolls on outside. “Her whole being is marbled through with guilt of it all,” Owens writes in anticipation of her character going back to work, “but a significant part of her has been hungering to return”, to escape the regular plummet into “a black hole of dead-eyed apathy”, as a “pinched, warped, hollow being”.

Amid the humour and viscera of marital squabbles, accidental texts, a mysterious tampon and breastfeeding on the toilet, serious issues are addressed about the modern woman’s practical and emotional responses to “having it all”, and whether any real contentment might be found down that path. Is it better to focus on your children until they are of school age, or to work all the way through using nannies and nurseries, possibly producing more confident, resilient offspring? Is it possible to maintain a sense of self throughout the wonders and woes of the maternal rollercoaster, or do we change irrevocably and for ever, becoming merely an outline, waiting to be refilled? These are eternal, ever-repeating questions, and Owens does not attempt to answer them, only to reflect on the heightened particulars of a singular, emotionally myriad experience. Both sobering and celebratory, this novel is a powerful addition to the literature of surviving procreation.

Diana Evans is the author of I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations and A House for Alice.

Washington Augustus Roebling, or “Wash”, was the chief engineer on the Brooklyn Bridge, which, when opened to the public on 24 May 1883, was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It was quite an achievement, but he didn’t do it alone. On the one hand there was his father, the austere and tyrannical John Roebling, who had designed and begun the bridge before his untimely death in 1869. On the other there was his wife, the accomplished and capable Emily, who, as well as providing moral and secretarial support, took on ever more responsibility for the project after Washington’s own health began to fail mysteriously.

Wash is something of a companion piece to Chief Engineer, Erica Wagner’s 2017 biography of Roebling. Spurning what she calls in her afterword “the clock’s time”, she has instead structured the narrative in accordance with “the soul’s time”; that is, by jumping backwards and forwards in time and place in a series of short chapters emphasising those individual moments, choices and encounters that together made this remarkable man who he was. It is a bold and engaging, if somewhat disorienting approach, giving this slender novel a vividness and intensity that might be smoothed over in a more traditional narrative arc.

The story begins in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1849. The household of John Roebling is a depressing place in which to grow up. A self-made man, now rich from his wire rope business and famous for his Niagara Falls suspension bridge, Roebling is an oppressive and exacting – not to mention parsimonious – figure. “The man who bridged Niagara, and much else besides”, remarks a bitter but awed Wash, “the very chasms tremble at his approach!” So too do his wife and children, who keep their eyes down and their voices low when in his presence, for “it was much the safest way”. They frequently go hungry; the strap is often at hand. Needless to say, Wash’s childhood is an unhappy one.

Fortunately, happiness comes in the form of two individuals: Max Andermann, a fellow engineering student, and Emily Warren, his future wife. Max is a charming and attractive figure (based on a real person, but here renamed), who shows immediate solicitude for the undernourished and overworked Wash. Tall, good-looking and well-groomed (like a “Macassar-scented bear”), he adds a new dimension to Wash’s austere existence. They open up to one another about their difficult childhoods (“Washington had never spoken to anyone in this way before”), and eventually share a kiss. Wash treasures a photograph of the two men together for the rest of his life.

Emily, too, brings wit and warmth into Wash’s life, as well as a fresh determination to succeed in a manner different from that of his father. “A new leaf. A new life. From this very moment”, he vows. The two become a sort of 19th-century power couple, running the groundbreaking project almost, but not quite, as equals. As Wash becomes increasingly unwell, Emily is more and more relied upon as “caretaker, nursemaid, secretary – and increasingly, she felt, engineer”. Wagner gives due attention to the emotional toll taken on the wife of such a man. While he holes up with his plans and his rock samples, she is left to deal with the politics and practicalities of the outside world. “Solitude was what he required,” Emily thinks to herself. “But what did she require?”

Wagner clearly has a deep personal connection to Brooklyn Bridge and to Wash himself (in her afterword she admits that as a young woman “I thought I was in love with him”). The happy result is a richly detailed and multifaceted portrait of a monumental American life. While the reader may not develop an all-consuming crush on Washington Augustus Roebling, this nuanced and idiosyncratic novel shows that his was a life worth revisiting.

Not With a Bang by Temi Oh (Solstice, £20)
The four daughters of a doomsday prepper were trained what to do in an emergency: grab their bags and head for the well-stocked bunker he had built in the garden of their London home. But when a world-shattering event occurs, the family are dispersed, individually forced to weigh their best options for survival as they shelter in place or struggle through devastated, chaotic streets. The story could suit a disaster movie (the author also writes screenplays), but it’s the complex characterisations and conflicted relationships that make for a powerfully compelling read. The characters are shown from different perspectives, and are flawed, human and real. Perfectly paced, this is a suspenseful depiction of survival amid civilisational collapse.

Tillinghast by Clare Cavenagh (Borough, £16.99)
Stutley Tillinghast has lived alone for a long time. Formerly a minister in a rural Rhode Island parish, he is now caretaker of an empty church. He avoids contact with others – except when his peculiar need drives him to find someone he can kill without attracting attention, take what he requires, and then bury the body in the cellar with all the others. His life is upended by the arrival of a visitor from England, a young woman called Sarah who has come looking for her mother. There’s no possibility that Sarah could be his daughter, yet he recognises the symptoms of her illness: it is the same as his. She has become too weak to do what she must to save her own life, and he will not let her die. This debut novel, inspired by the 19th-century New England vampire panic, is a haunting, original modern gothic, a welcome departure from the usual tropes.

Atomic Coffin by Benedict Anning (Bantam, £20)
This 1984-set debut combines a cold war spy novel with lurking horrors beneath the sea. Heidi Sperling, codename Thistle, is a British field asset in East Germany, where she intercepts a message regarding a previously unknown Soviet nuclear submarine on the seabed between Scotland and Iceland. Heidi is inexperienced as an agent, but required to meet the nearest British submarine and go with it to assess the threat. As the only person who speaks Russian, she is forced to overcome her fear and join the initial boarding party. The Russian sub appears empty of life, yet something is there. After the expedition’s leader disappears, Heidi finds herself under suspicion, and realises she can’t trust her own memories in what is a creepy, disorienting journey into fear.

The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden (Century, £20)
In this historical fantasy inspired by the life of Anne of Brittany, Anne is a few years older than the teenager whose marriage was arranged to the king of France in the 15th century, and we are fully in a realm of folklore and fantasy, where Breton fairies are real. No one has seen a live unicorn in 100 years, but Anne is able to encounter one in the legend-haunted forest of Brocéliande, and to meet a wild-eyed man emerging from the Lost Lands two centuries after he strayed out of the mortal world. The result is rich, immersive and wonderfully escapist.

Bad Things Happen Here by Mark Morris (Flame Tree, £20)
That a place can be haunted, or have a sinister atmosphere, is well established; less readily accepted is the idea that a resident spirit could leave one location to travel about and haunt others. In the latest novel by the British Fantasy award-winning author, the fifth floor of an otherwise ordinary hall of residence was the place where bad things happened to some first-year students. Twenty years on, the survivors find their lives disrupted by intrusive thoughts and hallucinations, until even the most determined rationalist among them considers calling in an exorcist, and decides they must go back to the source. A terrifyingly believable modern horror that will hold believers and sceptics in its thrall.

When a British journalist named Joseph Adelaide tracks down a reclusive artist to his remote farmhouse in the south of France, his plan is to interview him for a magazine profile. Edouard Tartuffe is a revered painter who was taught by Cézanne and is known on the Parisian art scene as the “Master of Light”. But then he retreated from the limelight amid rumours of a feud with his former mentor.

Tartuffe – known as Tata – now lives with his 27-year-old niece, Ettie, and is blind in one eye. Joseph quickly learns that Tata also has an explosive temper and rules the household with an iron fist. On meeting Joseph, he barks that he will not be giving an interview but that his guest can stay on one condition: that he model for him for a new portrait.

Lucy Steeds’s evocative novel is set over a summer in Provence in 1920 where the landscape shimmers, the cicadas hum and “sunlight radiates from the yellow fields”. Steeds’ book is as much a sensory as literary experience as the listener is immersed in the heady smell of turpentine and the pungent stink of still life fruit and fish arrangements deliberately left to rot in the Provençal heat.

The reader is Tanya Reynolds, who imbues the mystery of the brutish Tata and his withdrawal from the world with atmosphere and slow-burning tension. Joseph believes the key to understanding this once-towering artist lies with the quiet, contemplative Ettie, who has lived with her uncle since childhood and is harbouring secrets of her own.

Available via John Murray, 11hr 3min

Further listening

Sanctuary
Marina Warner, William Collins, 12hr 56min
A moving essay series on the places we choose to live. Subtitled Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, Warner’s book explores the concept of human refuge and shelter from the ancient world to the present day. Read by the author.

Am I Having Fun Now?
Suzi Ruffell, Bluebird, 8hr 54min
The standup comic and podcaster’s book is part memoir about growing up as a working-class queer woman and part self-help manual on how to navigate life, from education and employment to parenthood, as an anxious person.