A Town Called Solace: ‘Will break your heart’ Graham Norton

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Even minor characters – from Liam’s tough, touchy wife Fiona to Mrs Orchard’s wilful cat Moses – seem to have lives beyond the page. Liam’s sense of isolation is well drawn, as is the pain he feels over his imminent divorce, and Lawson does well to steer away from cliche when a mutually suspicious relationship forms between him and Clara.

Small Things Like These (Faber) by Claire Keegan, on the other hand, casts its gaze backward, to Ireland in 1985; its balance of crystalline language and moral seriousness makes it profoundly moving. All four of her books are set in fictional locations inspired by the villages and rural areas of Northern Ontario, where the author grew up before moving to England in 1968.On the National Post 's Paperback Fiction Best-Sellers list in 2007, Lawson's second novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, took the number-one spot. The town of Solace is so starved of excitement that the arrival of Liam, handsome, single and brooding over the breakdown of his marriage, inspires so much twitching of local curtains that a fair breeze must be felt around the streets. It’s totally possible to read it without acknowledging the depth, but when you become aware of it while reading, it suddenly became that much more exciting a read. I have been deeply impressed by recent books that invite us to reconsider aspects of British and global history, culture and identity beyond the often distorted, dishonest and pumped-up myth-making that has long prevailed. Also, Fortune(Peepal Tree Press) , by Amanda Smyth, another historic novel, a clandestine love story set amid Trinidad’s early oil drilling years in the 1920s.

The Heathens (Little, Brown) by Ace Atkins is pure, uncut, US southern noir with a modern social media twist. I think it can be read as a simple story, but there’s way more going on beneath the surface and in terms of literary devices that can be easily overlooked. The beautiful, horrible world of Mariana Enriquez, as glimpsed in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (Granta), with its disturbed adolescents, ghosts, decaying ghouls, the sad and angry homeless of modern Argentina, is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.

Many of them consider how people grapple with the past – whether personal experiences of grief or dislocation or the historical legacies of enslavement, apartheid and civil war. All of them are delicately created and very realistic characters, and you can empathize with them somehow. Ishiguro makes the cut alongside some heavyweight names, from Richard Powers, chosen for the yet-to-be-published Bewilderment, about a widowed astrobiologist trying to raise his nine-year-old son, to Rachel Cusk, longlisted for Second Place, in which a woman invites an artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives. When the story begins we meet Clara standing at the window of her house, watching obsessively, waiting for her sister Rose (16) who has run away from home. I enjoyed Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages (Fourth Estate), narrated with verve and ingenuity by an actual book, a novel by Joseph Roth, which got saved from the Nazi bonfire and then taken on a picaresque journey across the Atlantic and back to Germany.

Paul (Granta) by Daisy Lafarge is a mesmerising novel about a young woman’s trip to France and ensuing entanglement with a man whose grotesque secrets begin to surface. As ever, the Nobel laureate is exploring the messy mysteries of emotion, memory and what it is to be human: the book makes a fascinating companion piece to his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. The author, who has been shortlisted three times, was praised by judges for his “haunting narrative voice – a genuinely innocent, ego-less perspective on the strange behaviour of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear”.An article featuring Mary Lawson was published in the McGill News magazine by Neale Mcdevitt and Daniel Mccabe.

Ellie Taylor opens up about going back to work after eight weeks of maternity leave: 'Feeling very grateful. Sethi wrote this book after being the victim of a horrible racist attack on a train from Liverpool to Newcastle. Enter thirtyish Liam Kane, newly divorced, newly unemployed, newly arrived in this small northern town, where he promptly moves into the house next door--watched suspiciously by astonished and dismayed Clara, whose elderly friend, Mrs. The drama is understated yet palpable and the mundane slowly gets filled with intrigue and curiosity was the layers are revealed.

Similarly dauntless, in Second Place (Faber), Rachel Cusk abandons the distinctive style of her Outline trilogy for a new voice. I truly believe that attention is the most sacred resource that we have to spend on this planet, and books are perhaps the last places where we spend this resource freely, and where it means the most. Orchard's, and Liam Kane's--the novel cuts back and forth among these unforgettable characters to uncover the layers of grief, remorse, and love that connect families, both the ones we're born into and the ones we choose. Angry, rebellious Rose, had a row with their mother, stormed out of the house and simply disappeared. It’s a tender and inviting story I’d recommend to readers of Wendy McGrath and Anne Tyler, with Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley and Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout as specific readalikes.