The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Cape £7.99/ebook £7.49, ST Bookshop price £7.59
Tony Webster, who narrates Barnes’s quietly nightmarish, Man Booker prize-winning novel, has had a peaceable life. Contentedly retired after a career in arts administration, he is on amicable terms with the wife he divorced years ago and with their daughter. Apart from one distant period of turbulence — when he was involved at university with a “bloody difficult young woman”, Veronica Ford — his existence has been singularly well regulated.
It is a state of affairs that, in fiction, often bodes ill. And dramatic upset duly arrives in the form of a solicitor’s letter. Veronica’s mother has, Tony is amazed to learn, left him some money in her will, along with a letter apologising for her family’s treatment of him. The bequest should also have included, Tony hears, the diary of his one-time schoolfriend Adrian Finn, who took up with Veronica after she and Tony parted, and who some time later killed himself.
A dexterously crafted narrative of unlooked-for consequences, the book increasingly takes on the momentum of a taut horror tale: a 21st-century successor to the great suspense novellas — quivering not just with tension but with psychological, emotional and moral reverberations — of masters such as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Uncovering, link by link, an appalling chain reaction of briefly wished-for revenge, almost accidental damage, and remorse that agonisingly bites after most of a lifetime, this is a harsh tale rich in humane resonances. Peter Kemp
Man with a Blue scarf by Martin Gayford
Thames & Hudson £12.95, ST Bookshop price £11.65
Art critic Gayford already knew Lucian Freud as a friend when, in November 2003, he offered to pose for the artist. He hoped he might get time off while Freud was painting the background, but no. Nor was he allowed to read — which is just as well, otherwise we would not have this valuable record of Freud’s conversation. Gayford also turns out to have been an excellent sitter, inspiring one of Freud’s best late portraits. His book is a valuable contribution to art history and will be read as long as Freud’s work is admired. Lynn Barber
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Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar
Penguin £8.99/ebook £5.49, ST Bookshop price £8.54
Nuri, the narrator of Matar’s follow-up to his acclaimed novel In the Country of Men, is the son of an Arab former minister who is abducted from a flat in Geneva, never to be heard from again. The book is an investigation of this event — but Matar is interested in mystery rather than suspense. Haunting in every sense, this is an absorbing novel that finds its eloquence in what is left unsaid and its most vivid imagery in what has been lost. Adam Lively
Weeds by Richard Mabey
Profile £8.99/ebook £8.99, ST Bookshop price £8.54
Most gardeners hate those pesky intruders that spoil our borders; Mabey, though, wants us to see weeds differently, and finds a wild beauty in them. In this illuminating book, he uses weeds as a way to explore wider ideas about the natural world and how humans interact with it: “Plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans.” This is a profound and sympathetic meditation on nature: we have benefited from weeds, too, more than we might like to admit. Bee Wilson
The London Satyr by Robert Edric
Black Swan £8.99/ebook £8.99, ST Bookshop price £8.54
Set in London in the sultry summer of 1891, Edric’s novel offers many opportunities for colourful sensationalism. Its narrator, Webster, is a photographer working for Sir Henry Irving and Bram Stoker, his manager, at the Lyceum theatre. As a lucrative sideline, Webster supplies props and costumes to a sinister, manipulative pornographer, Marlow (the “London Satyr” of the book’s title). But the book’s real strength is not so much social accuracy as psychological acuity. David Grylls
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No Angel: The Secret Life of Bernie Ecclestone by Tom Bower
Faber £8.99/ebook £8.99, ST Bookshop price £8.54
In his biography of the motor-racing supremo, Bower provides no skeletons or guns; but he reveals the Formula One family as a true nest of vipers in which Ecclestone is supreme. Bower’s portrayal of Slavica, Ecclestone’s former wife, is brutal, revealing that the feared dictator of motor racing was craven in the face of her volatility. Yet within Formula One, every attempt to bring down Ecclestone failed. He was always too clever. Nick Pitt