A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler
Vintage £7.99
ebook 5.99
If this 20th novel from Tyler is her last, as she has said, she couldn’t be rounding off her 50-year fictional career more splendidly. Set in Baltimore, like most of her books, it draws you into the imaginative territory she has spent half a century exploring with a zest and finesse that have won her high critical acclaim and a devoted readership. Encompassing four generations of the Whitshank family, it surveys relations between husbands and wives, siblings, parents and children. Her gift for producing what seems less like fiction than actuality works wonders. Characters all but elbow their way off the page with lifelikeness. Eddying back and forth across eight decades, the narrative radiates vitality. But, below the surface sparkle, darker depths can be seen. Tyler opens up fresh perspectives on themes and situations that have recurred through her fiction: tensions between conformity and independence; the pull of home and the desire to break away. There are terrific set pieces of a kind she has made her own: fraught family mealtimes, a hilariously awkward wedding, a funeral veering between grief and social unease. Peter Kemp
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Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr
Bloomsbury £14.99
ebook £10.99
Williams’s tumultuous family background gave him not just an indelible psychological scar, it was, as Lahr’s magnificent biography shows, the wellspring of his art. In play after play he was to recall and reconfigure the events and characters of his toxic upbringing. Lahr’s book would be worth reading just for the anecdotes and the famous names that flit through its pages. But in essence it is a study — incisive, compelling, often painful — of how art feeds on life. Lahr tells us that assimilating the shelf of books already written on Williams, searching out new sources, and sifting out the truth from lies and legends took him 12 years. They were years well spent. John Carey
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Chasing Lost Time by Jean Findlay
Vintage £10.99
Marcel Proust did not write Remembrance of Things Past: his novel is called In Search of Lost Time, but for generations of English readers, that poetic but misguided version was better known. Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, the man responsible for the influential translation of one of the monuments of 20th-century literature is as complex and contradictory as any of its characters. He was a military man who fought in the First World War and enjoyed it. A Catholic convert from the austere Scottish Protestantism of his youth, he was an enthusiastic homosexual, who wrote outrageous filth to amuse friends. While working on the later volumes of Proust, he was a British spy in Mussolini’s Italy. In this biography, Findlay (his great-great-niece), charts an astonishing life. David Mills
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The Ice Twins by SK Tremayne
HarperCollins £7.99
ebook £8.49
The Ice Twins belongs to the rival Daphne du Maurier tradition of dumping nice heroines in scary places. A year ago, Sarah and Angus lost their young daughter Lydia in a tragic accident, but now Kirstie, her twin sister, insists on being called Lydia, leaving her mother unsure which girl died. Kirstie’s weird behaviour worsens when the still-grieving family gamble on relocating to a tiny Scottish island. Tremayne’s novel has grip, pace, bags of atmosphere and one of the cleverest endings of recent thrillers. John Dugdale
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The Fires of Autumn by Irene Nemirovsky
Vintage £7.99
ebook £5.99
Némirovsky’s novel begins in 1912 with what feels like a prose equivalent to an impressionist painting as two Parisian families watch aristocrats and celebrity courtesans returning from the races in horse-drawn carriages. The scene soon darkens as the book plunges into the First World War, then on through the cynicism of the 1920s and the financial turmoil of the 1930s, into the Nazi occupation of France. The final section, which takes you into the world that Némirovsky brilliantly captured in Suite Française, ends on a note of hope. Sombrely counterpointing it is your awareness that just months after writing this she would die in Auschwitz. Peter Kemp
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Late Fragments by Kate Gross
WM Collins £8.99
ebook £4.49
The author died, aged 36, from colon cancer, and this memoir was written for her five-year-old twin boys. Faced with imminent death, she used her newly found gift as a writer to compile this handbook on living and dying. You get the brief story of her cancer (working mother too busy to go to the GP, or then get a second opinion), but the book’s power lies in the unflinching way she shares her life’s lessons, and how her brain rationalises what it is really like to be told: “You are going to die.” Jackie Annesley
Buy for £8.54, inc p&p, from The ST Bookshop