Our pick of the week's releases
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Penguin, £8.99
This novel sparked a publishing furore in 2005. Jonathan Safran Foer had made his name with Everything Is Illuminated, and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Closepolarised critical opinion. Some accused Safran Foer of latching on to 9/11 as a facile pulse for the emotional heart of the book; others derided his hero, Oskar, a nine-year-old whose father died in the World Trade Center, as too clever and knowing to be believable. There is no doubt that the novel is imperfect: in places, Oskar comes across as perceptive beyond his years, and more robust editing would benefit the book's pace. That said, this is a novel of serious intent and emotional weight, and Safran Foer does enough with his nine-year-old hero to make him one of the most beguiling young characters in modern American literature. This edition is to coincide with a forthcoming film – which will have its work cut out to match the gentle brilliance and originality of these pages. Laurence Mackin
To a Mountain in Tibet
Colin Thubron
Vintage, £8.99
Colin Thubron doesn't generally give away much about his family life in his very stylish travel books, but this journey to Tibet's holiest mountain, Kailas, was undertaken as a kind of tribute to his recently dead mother, his late father and his sister, who died at the age of 21. Thus he doesn't just walk into the higher reaches of the Himalayas but explores his own notions of eternity as well as the more outre regions of Buddhism and Hinduism. It's an intellectual landscape of demonic deities and off-the scale superstition mirrored, in the physical world, by the miserable poverty of the region, the charnel house that is Tibetan sky burial – definitely not for the squeamish, this section – and the endlessly circling pilgrims with their inevitable flotsam of empty cans and cigarette cartons. There's plenty of classic Thubron observation as he sets off with his guide, Iswor, and his cook, Ram, but there's no false consolation in the bleakly courageous closing pages, which gaze into the abyss without flinching or faltering. Arminta Wallace
Gillespie and I
Jane Harris
Faber and Faber, £7.99
Following the death of an aunt for whom she spent years caring, Harriet Baxter leaves her Bloomsbury home for Scotland and the distractions of the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888. She soon meets the Gillespie family, a semi-Bohemian clan that includes the up-and-coming young artist Ned, his wife, Annie, and their two daughters. As unlikely as the friendship seems, Harriet soon becomes part of the family's life and they of hers. The story takes a chilling turn when Sybil, Ned's eldest daughter, begins to carry out various acts of vandalism and sadism on her little sister, setting the tale off in some unexpected directions. Harris is a very fine writer, and in Harriet she has created a witty and cunning narrator of an absorbing tale full of intriguing characters, unsettling events and a resolution that has to be read to be appreciated . Claire Looby
Dancing in the Asylum
Fred Johnston
Parthian, £8.99
The title story that opens Fred Johnston's first collection sets the mood, as the alcoholic Pritchard loses everything – marriage, marbles and means of support – before finding a hallucinatory kind of refuge down a corridor of the mental hospital where he has ended up. Pritchard's tone, dyspeptic but vulnerable, is typical of Johnston's protagonists, most of whom feel like outsiders in the unnamed Irish towns whose intrigues and atmospheres oppress them. Galway-based Johnston, founder of Cúirt literary festival and the Western Writers' Centre, is better known for his poetry than for his fiction, and he has a tendency to resolve the situations he sets up with dreamlike poetic flourishes, which can seem evasive. His material, though, is interestingly varied – from a single mother moving into an empty estate to a would-be novelist paying for friendship to an uneasy gay encounter at a carnival – and, at its best, expressive of a distinctive and dissenting point of view. Giles Newington
If Walls Could Talk
Lucy Worsley
Faber and Faber, £9.99
Did you know that families in rural Ireland in the early 19th century slept in a communal bed, with the eldest girl at the wall and then – in order of age – sisters, mother, father, brothers, then strangers? Or that royals and other aristocrats used to go to the toilet in company; that wallpaper was so popular by 1712 it was taxed; and that the first drawers (or knickers) appeared around the start of the 17th century? The historian Lucy Worsley wears her learning lightly in this canter through 800 years of British domestic life, a companion to a TV series of the same name. Written in a somewhat gratingly superjolly style, it explores what people did in each of the various rooms of the house, and is stuffed with a bewildering number of facts, with not much room for context. Still, an interesting introduction to how the British lived. Frances O'Rourke
