Invisible, by Paul Auster

New York City, Spring 1967: Twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born, and his silent and seductive girlfriend Margot. Falling into a passionate affair with Margot, Walker soon finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life.

Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible is told by three different narrators as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island, in a story of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice.

With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.

Suffer the Children, by Adam Creed

DI Will Wagstaffe – ‘Staffe’ to friends and enemies alike – is a man with many burdens. On the eve of leaving for a personal trip abroad he is called to the scene of a horrific crime: a known paedophile has been butchered in his own home. As the violence escalates Staffe finds himself having to protect known offenders and haul the families of their victims down to the precinct. The case splits Staffe and his team, for it calls into question the whole idea of justice – when the courts have failed to prosecute the perpetrators of child abuse where does that leave the victims and their families?

As he digs deep into London’s dirtiest seams, figures from Staffe’s past come back to haunt him: Sylvie, the estranged love of his life, and Jessop, his ex-partner and mentor. In pursuing justice, he has to hurt the ones he loves but with his boss and the newspapers out to get him Staffe must revisit the past in order to make sense of the present and end the violence. In doing so the areas between right and wrong are blurred but the main question remains: how far would you go to protect your children?

• Listen to Adam Creed reading from Suffer the Children (part 1)
• Listen to Adam Creed reading from Suffer the Children (part 2)

Winterland, by Alan Glyn

The worlds of business, politics and crime collide when two men with the same name, from the same family, die on the same night – one death is a gangland murder, the other, apparently, a road accident. Was it a coincidence? That’s the official version of events. But then a family member, Gina Rafferty, starts asking questions.

Devastated by her loss, Gina’s grief is tempered, and increasingly fuelled, by anger. The more she hears that it was all a coincidence – that gangland violence is commonplace; that people die on our roads every day of the week – the less she’s prepared to accept it. Told repeatedly that she should stop asking questions, she becomes more determined than ever to establish a connection between the two deaths – and in doing so she embarks on a path that will push certain powerful people to their limits.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

The Lacuna is the story of a man’s search for safety in the grinding jaws of two nations, at a moment when the entire world seemed bent on reinventing itself at any cost.

Born in the US, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is mostly a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. From a coastal island jungle to the unpaved neighbourhoods of 1930s Mexico City, through a disastrous stint at a military school in Virginia and back again, his fortunes never steady as Salomé finds her rich men-friends always on the losing side of the Mexican Revolution. Sometimes she gives her son cigarettes instead of supper.

He aims for invisibility, observing his world and recording everything with a peculiar selfless irony in his notebooks. Life is whatever he learns from servants putting him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Making himself useful in the household of the muralist, his wife Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, and the howling gossip and reportage that dictate public opinion.

A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina, he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. Under the watch of his peerless stenographer, Violet Brown, he finds an extraordinary use for his talents of observation. But political winds continue to push him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption.

This is a gripping story of identity, connection with our past, and the power of words to create or devastate. Like no other novel yet written, it illuminates an era when bold internationalism gave way to a post-war landscape of narrowly defined ‘Americanism’. Crossing two decades, from the vibrant revolutionary murals of Mexico City to the halls of a Congress bent on eradicating the colour red, The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World itself.

Old City Hall, by Robert Rotenberg

A talk-show host confesses to the brutal murder of his young wife. The evidence is cast iron. But when a determined detective, an ambitious rookie prosecutor and a defence lawyer keen to make her mark piece together the details of the case, nothing fits. An intricately plotted web of lies, half-truths and hidden motives emerges – along with a secret no one could have suspected.

Super Girl, by Ruth Thomas

Poignant as well as funny, Ruth Thomas’s new collection charts the difficulties people have when faced with the need to change. Delicately poised on the cusp of melancholy, fragility and folly, her stories offer a fresh take on the contradictions of human nature.

A young mother is alienated by the small talk of a ‘new mums’ coffee morning; a poet achieves success after thirty years of writing only to discover that nobody understands what he is saying; a father loses his shoes at a children’s party; a grandfather shares the pain and pleasure of his eightieth birthday with his baby grand-daughter; and, in the title story, a sensible young woman who everyone thinks of as a ‘super girl’ has her reputation thrown into jeopardy when an unexpected caller arrives at her babysitting job.

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