From Salena Godden’s celebratory novel to The Beloved Children by Tina Jackson, a magical realist tale by Richard Flanagan and Jane Harper’s latest, this week’s best new fiction
Mrs Death Misses Death
Salena Godden Canongate £14.99
Mrs Death, an elderly black woman, is world weary and tired of the invisibility of her job – being death itself. She begins to tell her life story to a writer who is struggling with mental health troubles and grief.
Dark at times – with compelling stories about miscarriages of justice, murder and racial oppression – it is nonetheless celebratory and life-affirming, aglow with love, fortitude and compassion.
Eithne Farry
The Living Sea Of Waking Dreams
Richard Flanagan Chatto & Windus £16.99
Middle-aged Australian architect Anna already has plenty on her plate, from bushfires and stroppy siblings to a sick mother, when one of her fingers mysteriously falls off.
Other limbs follow. Booker-winner Richard Flanagan is never dull and, if the blend of magic realism with more conventional topics such as ageing and environmental catastrophe is occasionally awkward, his prose has a pyrotechnic brilliance.
Max Davidson
The Beloved Children
Tina Jackson Fahrenheit £8.95
Chrysanthemum, Rose and Orage are three young girls thrown together in a dance troupe entertaining Brits in the 1940s. Backstage, they find themselves taken under the wing of a waspish wardrobe mistress and her mysterious Russian colleague and drawn into a world where no one is quite as they seem.
This gloriously offbeat tale has shades of Angela Carter, with its beguiling characters weaving a magical spell.
Kitty Marlow
The Survivors
Jane Harper Little, Brown £14.99
Australia’s Jane Harper may well be the finest thriller writer to emerge in recent years. The Survivors is set in a Tasmanian coastal town whose unforgiving sea has claimed many victims.
Kieran Elliott blames himself for the death of his brother in a sailing accident years earlier. On a rare return visit home, he finds himself drawn into a murder investigation.
Past and present begin to overlap in this compelling, beautifully characterised mystery.
John Williams