Another Planet by Tracey Thorn

Tracey Thorn, the singer-songwriter and one half of the band Everything But the Girl, now feels like she lives a conventional middle-class life in north London, with her three children and partner of over 30 years. Even this apparently settled life doesn’t stop her father commenting: “Oh, Tracey. She’s from another planet.” We shouldn’t be surprised. After reading Thorn’s first memoir Bedsit Disco Queen, he said “I never knew Tracey was so into music”—this about a woman who has sold over nine million records.

Another Planet, Thorn’s second memoir, is full of such moments of low-key comedy but there is also a serious side to the estrangement that she felt from her parents. She is candid about how the “distance that had grown up between me and my parents in my teens never quite closed up.”

Golden Child by Claire Adam

Twins make up only a small fraction of the population but loom disproportionately large in literature. They are handy for storylines involving mistaken identity and creepy synchronicity, and offer the chance to show how people whose lives begin in the same place can take drastically different paths. A contrast between dissimilar twins is at the heart of “Golden Child”, Claire Adam’s assured and compelling first novel, which is set in rural Trinidad, where she grew up, during the 1980s.

Unlike Viola and Sebastian in “Twelfth Night”, Peter and Paul Deyalsingh do not appear to be “An apple, cleft in two”. Not at all. Paul “tends to slink around”, while Peter “walks with a bold step”. The boys—aged 13 when the book opens—have been treated differently from the beginning. Paul was deprived of oxygen at birth; a doctor suggested to the twins’ father, Clyde, that “mental retardation” might have resulted.

How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs

The title of this debut collection of short stories might mimic that of a “How to” manual but Alexia Arthurs’s prose is anything but didactic. In the opening story, “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” the narrator Kimberley observes of her friend Cecilia that she was the “kind of black girl who didn’t think about her race as much as I did.” Although Kimberley initially views her friend as “a white girl trapped in a black girl’s body—an Oreo,” her judgment comes to seem too easy. Kimberley had also been labelled “an Oreo” at school because she liked spending time in the ceramics classroom.

Some of Arthurs’s protagonists live in Jamaica, others have been transplanted to North America and a few inhabit, at least psychologically, the limbo between the two.

China Dream by Ma Jian

Ma Jian’s novels have been banned in his native China for 30 years and he has been hailed as ‘China’s Solzhenitsyn’. His latest book, China Dream, also contains some of the zip and vigour found in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian visions. This must be one of the liveliest novels about brainwashing ever written.

Ma Daode, the protagonist, is the director of the China Dream Bureau. Chillingly, such a body exists and was tasked with promoting Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream of National Rejuvenation’ shortly after he came to power in 2012.

Ma Jian takes this concept one stage further and has Ma Daode work on ‘developing a neural implant, a tiny microchip which we would call the China Dream Device’. This is to be inserted into citizens’ brains to delete memories and dreams.

Land of the Living by Georgina Harding

Georgina Harding’s four previous novels – The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, Painter of Silence and The Gun Room – have all explored, in different territories, what trauma does to the psyche. Land of the Living is no exception. The Second World War has ended and a young British officer, Charlie Ashe, has returned to England to marry Claire. His experiences as a soldier in the Battle of Kohima – one of Britain’s bloodiest battles – and the subsequent months he spent lost in the jungles of Assam, are now firmly in the past.

Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver trained as biologist before she became a novelist and she has repeatedly shown her desire to anatomise society in her fiction. In her bestselling novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), she examined the impact of missionaries in the Belgian Congo and in her more recent novel, Flight Behaviour (2012), she took on climate change. In her latest novel Unsheltered, she turns her attentions to the recently disenfranchised middle class in contemporary North America.

Willa Knox is a woman under siege. Having strived for years, she newly finds herself a member of the precariat. The magazine she edited and the college at which her husband, Iano, taught both fold at the same time. The couple move into a wreck of a house she has inherited in Vineland, New Jersey, which they hope might be the answer to their prayers before realising it is so damaged as to be almost unliveable in.