What a Time to Be Alive by Jenny Mustard (Sceptre, £18.99)

This excellent novel charts Sickan’s late adolescence/very early adulthood as she navigates the challenging world of her peers, at university in Stockholm. Sickan is lonely, but is not quite at ease with people. Her hyper self-awareness – of her own social shortcomings, of her emotions – makes her a sympathetic narrator. Her childhood is revealed in flashbacks, where we see Sickan being relentlessly bullied as the only child of scientific researchers utterly unaware of her suffering. In university, Sickan makes firm friends with Hanna, falls in love with Abbe, and slowly becomes part of a group of friends. Navigating these relationships, she also falls in with Stockholm, which is vividly alive as a fitting backdrop to her story. This is a beautifully written novel that avoids cliches and comes to a moving conclusion that left this reader wanting more. Some grammatical choices were jarring – favouritising / Ville fell really bad / I wish I would have been there – and should have been picked up by an editor. Doreen Finn

Dear Miss Lake by AJ Pearce (Picador, £16.99)

Hampshire, England, July 1944. Five long years of war have taken their toll, still victory is in sight for the Allies. Emmy Lake, agony aunt at Women’s Magazine fulfils her duty in the “final push” of war efforts, by offering upbeat advice to readers concerned with missing POW husbands, pregnancies out of wedlock and efficient rationing. Dear Miss Lake is the final novel in The Wartime Chronicles series. It would be best understood as genre-fiction with an aim to entertain, not confront. In true British stiff-upper-lip fashion, the reality of wartime horror is delivered in a measured dose. While the cheery, chin-up, jaunty tone may rankle some readers, fans of this genre will be satisfied with charming characters and an uplifting story. Brigid O’Dea

Loved One by Aisha Muharrar (HarperCollins, £16.99)

Aisha Muharrar’s debut novel follows Julia, a jewellery designer, in the wake of the death of Gabe, an indie musician with whom she shared a decade-long “romance, friendship or some other unnamed kinship”. Though Julia self-describes as a “city-dwelling woman who had read Joan Didion”, Loved One is a far cry from Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. For a novel about grief, there is surprisingly little revelation about the experience of losing someone. What could have been a poignant tragicomedy about loss and healing is, in reality, a series of over-explained jokes that sound as if they’d fit more comfortably in an American sitcom. Muharrar is, in fact, an acclaimed television writer, and it seems as though that is where her talent lies. Emily Formstone