Books in brief: From a small-town scandal to the supernatural power of reading

It Could Never Happen Here
Eithne Shortall
Corvus, £12.99
Beverly Franklin is keenly aware of the prestige attached to her local primary school, and she'll maintain its reputation at any cost. But a scandal involving her own daughter soon threatens to exact an unexpectedly personal price. Eithne Shortall's latest novel skilfully plays with the conventions associated with small towns and their gossip networks, creating a cast of characters that are uncomfortably familiar for anyone who's ever lived in a parish as claustrophobic as Cooney. This could be any small Irish town and this intense relatability makes for a convincingly plausible narrative. While the language is clunky at times, It Could Never Happen Here is undeniably readable and raises important questions about the pressures children and young people operate under in a world where privacy is an increasingly alien concept. BECKY LONG

On Consolation
Michael Ignatieff
Picador, £16.99
As religious belief declines, and in a culture obsessed with success that doesn't "devote much attention to failure, loss or death", how do we find consolation? Michael Ignatieff looks to thinkers, who came through the darkest experiences, for what they can tell us about holding on to hope and belief in life's possibilities. Beginning with biblical and classical texts (Job, St Paul, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius) and proceeding through medieval and early modern writers (Dante, Montaigne, Hume) and on to moderns such as Marx, Akhmatova, Primo Levi and Camus, "the consolation they offer … lies in their example, in their courage and lucidity, and in their determination to leave something behind that might console us". Ignatieff argues, in this deeply important book, that it's not doctrines that console us but people. BRIAN MAYE

The Sentence
Louise Erdrich
Corsair, £20
The real and the supernatural lock eyes in this deeply layered, immersive novel. It begins with Tookie, an Ojibwe woman, who steals a corpse and unwittingly traffics drugs across State lines, and ends with the pandemic. Once she's released from prison, Tookie finds a job in a Minneapolis bookstore. "Doing the wrong thing in general was my nature." Tookie personifies wrong choices, becoming haunted not only by her own guilt, but by her most annoying dead customer, Flora. From its title, to the bookshop, to an old journal that may have killed Flora, books are an otherworldly presence. Throughout there is an ache of the unknown: the novel considers the mystery of reading, tied up intricately with our skeletons in the cupboard, asking what separates the reader from the book, the living from the dead. RUTH McKEE