The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

The American Civil War can hardly be said to be underexplored in fiction, from Gone with the Wind to Little Women to Cold Mountain. Until recently, however, novels featuring the backdrop have tended to focus on macho soldiers and the women they left behind.

The 29-year-old Texas-based author Nathan Harris was drawn to a fresh perspective on this subject matter in his debut novel as a way to understand the history of his own family: “All black writers are drawn to filling in their past,” he has said.

In Harris’s book, it is not just race that makes his characters’ lives precarious as the war ends. A passionate affair between two Confederate soldiers who were childhood friends must be kept secret as they return to Old Ox, the Georgia town they are both from. This is perhaps an echo of the gay couple fighting in the American Civil War in Sebastian Barry’s Costa Prize-winning novel Days Without End.

In The Sweetness of Water, last week longlisted for the Booker Prize, there are also two brothers, Landry and Prentiss, who have recently been freed from slavery and must work out what to do with their freedom.

The Black Dress by Deborah Moggach

Here is a rare dud from the usually reliable Deborah Moggach. Her protagonist, Pru, finds herself alone at 69 after Greg, her husband of decades, leaves her out of the blue. There is a further loss to come for Pru, and Moggach is good on her ‘howling loneliness’; but what she decides to do about it doesn’t quite ring true.

Urged on by her sexy, bolshy friend Azra (who was Linda from Sunderland before a sudden reinvention) to meet someone new, Pru begins searching out the funeral notices of strangers, so that she can gatecrash the ceremonies and hit on the widowed husbands. Azra has told her that widowers are less likely than divorcees to be bitter, and that young women don’t understand bereaved men.

Pru buys a Breakfast at Tiffany’s-type cocktail dress in a charity shop for these escapades and is invited home by at least one widower. There is some light farce here as Pru — with limited knowledge gleaned from Facebook — has to persuade grieving men and their families that she really did know their dead wife/mother/grandmother.

Consumed by Arifa Akbar

Arifa Akbar’s older sister Fauzia died unexpectedly of tuberculosis at the age of 43. In her first book, the Guardian’s chief theatre critic painstakingly traces her complicated but loving relationship with her sibling. She also seeks to uncover how it was possible that someone could die of undetected TB while being treated in a modern hospital in the UK. It remains “the greatest infectious killer in history,” and—alarmingly—in 2015 she discovers that TB rates in Britain were higher than those in Rwanda, Eritrea and Iraq.

Akbar also explores her complicated family dynamics with candour, including the contempt with which her father often treated Fauzia when she was a child. Their parents were an ill-matched couple and often rowed. This was made worse when the family returned from a brief period living in Lahore, and moved to a single room squat in Hampstead which had neither hot water nor heating. 

I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud

The springboard for Esther Freud’s eleventh novel comes from her own life – as it did for her debut novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), which told the story of her childhood adventures in Morocco with her mother and sister. This time around, Freud has drawn on her mother’s concealment of her pregnancy with her first child, Freud’s elder sister Bella. Bernardine Coverley – Esther Freud’s late mother – became pregnant at eighteen by the artist Lucian Freud and kept this a secret from her strict Irish Catholic parents. Even after Coverley had a second child with Freud, she decided not to tell her family. The first her parents heard of their grandchildren was when a relative wrote to tell them she had seen their daughter waiting at a bus stop with two small girls.

I Couldn’t Love You More is, as Freud writes in the acknowledgements, “a response to the idea: what would have happened if she’d been found out, or if she’d asked for help from the wrong people?”

Maxwell's Demon by Steven Hall

Steven Hall’s first novel, The Raw Shark Texts, became a cult hit when it was published in 2007. It has certainly matured with age: if its postmodernism looked a bit effortful fourteen years ago, in today’s climate of endlessly auto-fictive selves, it now seems rather charming.

Hall’s new novel, Maxwell’s Demon, is another unabashed piece of metafiction, which both draws attention to itself and to the act of reading it. “The writer divides and sorts, the reader divides and sorts”, we are told – a task that can feel onerous, given that among the novel’s subjects are the true form of angels and the origins of the alphabet; there are pages of text arranged in the shape of leaves. But Hall takes great pleasure in his half of the job and leads us playfully through the book’s various twists and turns, which makes our task feel less daunting.

His protagonist Thomas Quinn is an unsuccessful novelist and also the son of a great writer, now dead. Shortly before he died, Quinn’s father endorsed a novel by his protégé Andrew Black called Cupid’s Dream.

Fox Fires by Wyl Menmuir

Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for its discomfiting prose, but the fact that it had been written in a VW camper van on the north Cornish coast — where it was set — also drew attention.

The village in The Many appeared to be forgotten by the outside world, and the setting for Fox Fires is similarly isolated. Nineteen-year-old Wren Lithgow arrives in a mysterious European city state called O with her concert pianist mother. The peril they are in isn’t laboured, but the reader realises it by degrees — as Wren does. She was conceived in O, and on this return visit she resolves to track down her father, although she is not even sure of his name and cannot speak the local language, O’chian. The only clues she has to his identity are a single photo of her parents and a broken wind-up doll he gave her mother, which she has named Ariadne.

The claustrophobia of Wren’s relationship with her mother (at one point she keeps her hands in her pockets to stop herself from slapping her) is intensified by the secrecy and restrictions in O.