Groundwater by Thomas McMullan (Bloomsbury £18.99, 304pp)
John and Liz abandon their city life for a new start in a remote house by a lake. Their furniture is delayed, the local warden seems a bit strange and Liz’s sister, her husband and two children have turned up, expecting a bit of a holiday.
Then there is the longed-for child, John’s brewing work problems, the peculiar behaviour of Liz’s brother-in-law, who may be seriously ill, and the three students from a local campsite who start hanging around for no discernible reason.
McMullan’s shape-shifting novel is a masterclass in apprehension, exposing the fissures between an imagined life and its reality with stealthy power, and boldly upending reader expectations. Richly unsettling.
Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom (Hodder and Stoughton £20, 272pp)
When Ines has a miscarriage, her boyfriend appears more upset about it than she is.
She agrees, all the same, to return with him to her family home in Wales for a new beginning: after all, her career as an actress in London isn’t exactly going anywhere.
But also in Wales live her two elder sisters, Dylan and Emma, and their mother, Gwen, and before long the unspoken secrets and buried difficulties of their unconventional childhood start to rise to the surface.
Bergstrom, whose novel What A Shame was a Gen-Z hit, roves between the lives of all four women across a time span of several decades in ways that echo both the mess of remembered experience and the chaotic make-up of a life.
The story is not always easy to follow but Bergstrom’s prose has a rangy, off-the-cuff immediacy, as though you are reading what is happening from inside each character’s skin.
Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (Oneworld £10.99, 320pp)
Melissa Lucashenko’s latest novel is full of stories.
There are the tales Granny Eddie, a spirited First Nations elder, mischievously spins about her past when a team of white liberals co-opt her into their progressively minded bicentennial celebrations.
There are the consoling myths Australia likes to tell itself as a way of whitewashing its savagely colonial history.
And there is the story of Mulanyin, a Yugambeh man who falls in love with a Nyugi woman in 19th century Queensland as his life plays out against the pernicious reach of British colonialism.
Looping back and forth between the 1850s and the present day and steeped in the rituals and storytelling of First Nations culture, Edenglassie at times feels as vast as Australia itself. But it’s also written in a spirit of reconciliation, daring to dream what a future version of that country might look like.
