A character driven mystery that explores boundaries and trust, the characters and their voices are superbly portrayed, they are like closeups, snapshots of little action, complex inner worlds, all of whom have been tilted in some way and are in the process of finding their upright, their wings even; yet there is a clear, interlinked story that ties them together keeping the reader engaged and the plot moving forward at a good pace. Its subject matter makes it appropriate for all audiences, and it would make a great selection for book groups in particular. You can’t get much farther north than the Ontario of Mary Lawson’s icy, compelling stories of calamity and redemption.

Through Clara’s perspective we observe how confusing childhood can be when adults put so much effort into lying and withholding truth from them. Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Lake are the other two they’ve recommended to me (alongside this one, which they also loved). And now, not much more than twelve hours later, somewhat dazed and very short of sleep, he was sitting in a strange house, which he happened to own, trying to explain it all to a cop. Read alongside Jeremy Farrar’s more personal Spike: The Virus v The People (Profile) and Michael Lewis’s compelling The Premonition (Allen Lane), we see a disturbing common trait emerging in our country and others: the unwillingness to prioritise people’s lives over ideas and ingrained structures.

They are also interested – far more than most contemporary male novelists – in the intricate family dynamics that lead to sudden departures. Magpie (Fourth Estate) by Elizabeth Day is that rare novel that moves and taunts like a thriller, but also envelops and comforts like Middlemarch. All of them are delicately created and very realistic characters, and you can empathize with them somehow. All of Lawson’s creations, even the secondary figures, are dealing with distressing memories or a loss of some kind, the details of which might only emerge much later on. Erudite and reassuring , Four Thousand Weeks (Vintage) by Oliver Burkeman persuaded me to accept that my time on Earth is finite so I should therefore not fritter it away in overwork and overwhelm.

The title is both intriguing and promising and the cover, the way it zooms in on the house in a way that shows little else around it, is such an apt metaphor for the three lives it focuses on, those three windows into their worlds, and the three time sequences it immerses in to portray them. Lawson’s portrait of Clara — her innocence, agency and coping mechanisms — is charming but also superbly detailed: Clara’s authenticity jumps from the page. Eloquent and thoughtful…Not only has Lawson fulfilled the promise of her first novel, she has surpassed it in a layered, complex story about emotional power shifts. Ishiguro’s story of an AF, or “artificial friend”, which is bought as a companion for a 14-year-old girl, is one of 13 novels in the running for this year’s Booker, the most prestigious books prize in the UK. And it made me laugh out loud – often, little surprises and a fabulous last laugh for the closing scene.

Orchard has long ago heartaches that will never wane but she also has her late husband with her in spirit. After settling down, she wrote short fiction for women's magazines and then graduated to her first novel. Orchard, in her late seventies, who thought she was going for a brief stay in the hospital but was mistaken. Rooney has an old-fashioned belief that the novel can be a place in which the question of how we should live is continually at play. Perhaps it is because ultimately we are all concerned with the small corners of life that make up existence.