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.

The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam

After Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003) became a smash hit bestseller, novels with the word “wife” in the title began to proliferate, perhaps peaking with the publication of Jane Corry’s My Husband’s Wife (2016).

Tahmima Anam has now made her own contribution, with The Startup Wife.  Anyone who has read Anam’s previously published trilogy of novels tracing the chronicles of a family from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day, will know not to expect a domestic thriller from her latest book, however. The word “wife” dangles in the title as an apparent warning, nonetheless.

Asha Ray, a talented computer scientist halfway through her PhD, is the wife. At a funeral, she meets again the man she had had a high school crush on, 13 years after she last saw him and they marry without ceremony two months later. Her new husband, Cyrus Jones, has magnificent hair, a dead mother and is “encyclopaedically brilliant”. He is also, his wife observes, “a little bit ghost”.

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

“I once told you, Jeffers, about the time I met the devil on a train leaving Paris.” Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, “Second Place”, begins with this arresting recollection. At the end of the book a brief note informs readers that it “owes a debt to ‘Lorenzo in Taos’, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D.H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico”. It is not necessary to be familiar with this antecedent, however, to enjoy the oddly compelling (if intermittently baffling) story that Ms Cusk tells in the pages in between. 

Only ever referred to as M, the narrator is living happily with her second husband Tony “in a place of great but subtle beauty” in an unnamed country. It is 15 years after she encountered the devil (Jeffers, to whom she confides this hallucinatory experience, is her implied interlocutor throughout). Ms Cusk keeps the details of the landscape vague but the “woolly marsh” does not sound like New Mexico. M invites L, a painter and a friend of a friend, to stay at her “second place”, a cottage M and Tony have built on their land.