The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy. Maclehose Press, £8.99
Hard on the heels of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel comes this novel set in the hill country of northern India. Like the film, it treads a perilous path between comfort and kitsch. The ingredients tilt it towards the latter. A young widow whose English husband has died suddenly, leaving her cut off from her family, moves to a small town with a cast of larger-than-life characters, among them the elderly aristocrat Diwan Sahib, now gin-soaked and fallen on hard times. The ambience is reminiscent of Louis de Bernières's Birds Without Wings, the map inside the front cover adds a dash of Tolkien, and the three (or is it four?) love stories move the plot steadily along. Diwan Sahib is a terrific creation, cantankerous and capricious. In the end, though, what keep The Folded Earth on the right side of sugary are Roy's sure-footed portrait of this stunning landscape and her sadness at its imminent, and doubtless inevitable, loss. Arminta Wallace
Ten Stories About Smoking by Stuart Evers. Picador, £7.99
These 10 remarkable tales by the British writer Stuart Evers read as an inventory of failed marriages, sexually disenfranchised relationships and missing people. The contemporary world he portrays is unsettling and always something to escape from. Although the characters are named they feel anonymous, dislocated in their attempts to come to grips with the crises they face; for the most part they are not middle-aged but soon-to-be. The cigarette is the baton passed from story to story, acting as killer and comforter, as confidante, as an instrument of torture and self-mutilation and as a nostalgic reminder of reckless youth. Interested in the bald mechanics of a story, Evers draws everything tight. His language is clean-cut and concise; his narrative shifts are sudden and shocking. Yet for all its astringency the collection offers us tenderness and humour: "She had cellulite on her thighs," Marty says, looking at the naked Angela in What's in Swindon. "It was sexy in a way that women just don't understand." Michèle Forbes
A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates. Fourth Estate, £8.99
Read this book and you'll never again offer a widow the lame, trite consolations typically mumbled to women suffering devastating loss. Oates makes it clear that the only friend who came close was the one who blurted out: "Oh God, you are going to be so unhappy." Oates's book is a memoir of both her harrowing grief after the death of her husband and of her long, extraordinarily happy marriage, which nevertheless had secrets and silences. Fame, art, loving friends, a teaching job at a prestigious university: none of these protects Oates from a rapid descent into hell. Her torments include persistent fantasies of suicide, nasty bureaucrats who demand her husband's death certificate at every turn, well-meaning friends hinting that she should erase his voice from her voicemail, and a deluge of flowers that she helplessly lets rot. I read this book and shuddered, knowing that demographics predict that I, like most married women, will likely endure a similar bereavement. Mary Feely
Nowhere to Run by CJ Box. Corvus, £7.99
Campsites are being destroyed, animals are being slaughtered and a female Olympic runner has vanished while training in a remote area of the Sierra Madres in Wyoming. Local yokels say it’s the work of windigos – malevolent Indian spirits – but game warden Joe Pickett discovers that the culprits are all too human when he tangles with sibling survivalists who hold a violent grudge against the federal government. Pickett is, as always, an appealing hero, a moral Everyman who believes in God, duty and family, an essentially peaceful professional nonetheless comfortable with the heft of his Glock .40 semiautomatic. If you can look beyond the formulaic title, Box’s 10th Pickett novel is an exciting, rugged thriller. The author brings a ravishing landscape to life while saying something surprisingly complex and sobering about US gun culture and the Tea Party distrust of Washington DC. Kevin Sweeney
That Unearthly Valley: A Donegal Childhood by Patrick McGinley. New Island, £12.99
In the summer of 1935 Dylan Thomas took a sojourn in the Co Donegal seaside village of Glencolumbkille. Soon tiring of this “wild, unlettered and unfrenchlettered country”, the bibulous bard stole off one morning without paying for food or lodging. For the novelist Patrick McGinley the episode is a reminder that “poetry and the word of a poet are not necessarily the same thing”. McGinley himself was born in “Glen” in 1937, and with this quietly powerful memoir he scores a late literary equaliser for his beloved birthplace. His homage to a bilingual culture that was “rich in imagination and, above all, courteous and humane” is mercifully free of the maudlin mythmaking that can so often disfigure the genre, and the slow, cumulative portrait of his guarded but loving father is beautifully rendered. Perhaps most impressive of all, though, is the way personal story and social history are here blended into a sustained Wordsworthian meditation on time and the awful inexorability of its passing. Daragh Downes
