Roy Jenkins's portrait of the "great man" is reminiscent of Rembrandt's Night Watch, on permanent display in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Churchill by Roy Jenkins (Pan, £9.99 sterling)
Just as the Dutch painter's iconic masterpiece had to be cut down to size, at one point, to get it through the portals of a purpose-built exhibition centre, so also there are bits missing from this biography of Churchill. What emerges is a somewhat skewed, though extremely readable, account of the exploits of the younger Winston, scion of the British upper classes, monadic in his single-mindedness and sense of place in the world and empire, ambitious, ruthless, fated to succeed. It must have been tempting for Jenkins - like Churchill a former British home secretary and chancellor of the exchequer - to leave the microscope too long on these areas. And indeed, there are less "missing bits" there than in the analysis of Churchill as prime minister during the war years. But it's a big book on a big life, written in a clear style that matches Churchill's own. - Colman Cassidy
The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart (Bloomsbury, £6.99 sterling)
Never quite just another family epic, this thoughtful elegy of loss and discovery succeeds through its restrained lyricism. Canadian Urquhart's slow-moving, gently insistent fifth novel layers cultures with personal histories. Central to the narrative and the main characters is the act of carving in stone, a merging of craft and time. There are echoes of Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje, but Urquhart's understated voice is her own and her deliberate, plain prose calmly eases the narrative through its more improbable developments. It opens beguilingly with a young German priest who has a vision, to build a stone church. Happily guiding his flock in mid-19th-century Bavaria, Father Gstir imagines he has been ordered to go to Canada. He laughs at the notion, but is soon on his way there as part of an initiative devised by the mad King Ludwig. Almost a century passes and we meet Klara, a spinster who "had her memories" and a complex story. Now read on . . . - Eileen Battersby
The Mitford Sisters: The Biography of an Extraordinary Family by Mary S. Lovell (Abacus, £ 9.99 sterling)
So here they all are again, those madcap Mitford sisters. Can there be a set of siblings more scrutinised in recent decades, and did their deeds really deserve quite so much attention? The Mitford industry is proof of the enduring British fascination with its aristocracy and of how far a modest talent can be taken if it comes with a background. Yes, some of the sisters possessed a certain literary talent, most notably Nancy Mitford, whose novels have a lightness of humour better suited to fiction than her historical biographies. Mary S. Lovell places her in the context of the rest of the family, which is worthy but does lead to stretches of ennui for a reader not terribly interested in the minutiae of Mitfordiana. While new material has been discovered, one has to ask: was it worth the search? Having worked through 600-plus pages, the only possible conclusion must be that this is strictly a book for diehard fans. - Robert O'Byrne
Oxygen by Andrew Miller (Sceptre, £6.99 sterling)
In a country house in England, Alice Valentine is dying of cancer. One son, Alec, tends to her, squeamishly; the other, Larry, one-time tennis champion and TV actor and soon-to-be porn star, is expected home from LA as soon as he can raise some money and get his marriage back together. In Paris, in an almost entirely unconnected story, Laszlo, a famous playwright whose work Alec is translating, is troubled by a moment of cowardice during the Hungarian revolution of 1956 that cost the life of the great love of his youth. Each character is seeking some kind of redemption or release, the chance to breathe easily again - or not at all. Miller's novel, however, is strangely airless and muted, trapped in over-familiar terrain and, for all his skilful, controlled writing, it lacks the spark of inspiration or a theme that would make the characters' fates really involving. - Giles Newington
Now You See Me by Lesley Glaister (Bloomsbury, £6.99 sterling)
There's nothing remarkable about the premise of Glaister's tough and tender novel: Lamb, a young woman with a grim history, falls in love with Doggo, a criminal on the run, but in Glaister's hands it becomes a page-turner, the kind you look forward to going to bed to read. Her style is deceptively simple - here, you feel, is a writer with little time for pretension - but her powers of observation and description are acute and almost every page has a sentence that thrills. She captures life on the margins in an unnamed city in the north of England, and, most impressively, expertly conveys the confusion and anguish of Lamb, the book's narrator. And while they are damaged, her characters aren't stuck in the nihilistic quagmire of say, Irving Welsh's, which makes it easier to root for them in their struggle to trust and love, and makes this book a low-key but real pleasure. - Cathy Dillon
Friends Indeed by Rose Doyle (Coronet, £5.99 sterling)
The friends of the title are Sarah, a feisty housemaid, and Alicia, the daughter of an affluent Irish businessman. It's the 1850s and the two women, whose unbreakable friendship grew from childhood, are nearing 21; for both of them, life is about to change beyond anything they could have imagined. Bad luck and bad judgment sees the two seeking refuge in the Curragh of Kildare, where Dublin's outcast women - mostly prostitutes and unmarried mothers - camped out in the bushes for years on end to escape the persecution they suffered in the moralistic and socially divided society of the day. The women are called "wrens" because of the nest-like structures they live in. Rose Doyle describes this disturbingly real part of Irish social history with moving detail and weaves it into an old-fashioned romance. The historical detail grips while the women's romances move the story along at a cracking pace, taking the action from the tenements of Henrietta Street and the affluence of Haddington Road to San Francisco. - Bernice Harrison
Meeting the Invisible Man: Secrets and Magic in West Africa by Toby Green (Phoenix, £7.99 sterling)
Can men become invisible? Can magic protect you from knife attacks? Do the marabouts of West Africa possess gris-gris (charms)? Toby Green wants to discover if our visibility is so flimsy that magic can destroy it - if there is another notion of reality, divorced from our Western empirical view - but his search brings him danger, fear and malaria as well as an arduous trek to obtain the skin of a black cat and a recently used shroud. But Green takes away with him friendships and a belief in ancient magic along with an understanding of the complex history of slavery, war, racism, poverty and exploitation. A fascinating, intimate, lively account of a magical struggle to know the unknowable. - Sarah Marriott