Moderato Cantabile, by Marguerite Duras (Calder, £5.99 in UK)

How seriously are we supposed to take a book in which a nervy, complaining mother threatens her child "You've got to learn the piano, you've got to"? Tense, edgy melodrama is the preferred literary, mode of the late Marguerite Duras. Author of The Lover and of the Hiroshima, Mon Amour screenplay, she was intent on making the erotic her specialist subject; in the process, she wrote intense, one dimensional, unintentionally self parodic fiction. This forced, cryptic narrative, first published in 1958, follows the languid antics of a bored wife who witnesses the messy aftermath of a crime of passion while taking her son home from his dreaded music lesson. Her curiosity leads her into a strange relationship which feeds her voyeurism and her latent urge towards self destruction.