Mary Swann by Carol Shields (Fourth Estate, £6.99 in UK)

Depending where you stand on intelligent, articulate novels that poke fun at the lit-crit brigade, you'll either welcome this wry, oddly poignant addition to the genre - or sigh heavily and move on. Carol Shields has created a clever fiction here as she circles the elusive figure of her eponymous heroine, hacked to death by her husband hours after she delivers a paper-bag full of poems to the local newspaper editor in a small Canadian town and hailed, posthumously and possibly totally erroneously, as a latter-day Emily Dickinson. Presented from a series of shifting perspectives - the sincere young academic, the hard-boiled biographer, the small-town librarian - Shields's narrative is edgy yet absorbing, her characters (unless you get stuck at the awful Morton Jimroy; stick with him, it's worth it) rounded yet surprising. This is not the smart-ass satire of an Amis or a Lodge, but a downhomier affair by far, and all the better for it.