The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood (Allen & Unwin, £8.99)

Two women wake up in a prison in the middle of a desert. They don’t know where they are, but are told it is "what" they are that has landed them there. They soon find out there are other women, all of whom have been kidnapped and incarcerated for sexual misdemeanours. The prison is run by two misogynistic men and a "nurse", who terrorise and demean the inmates. It is a truism that voyeurism can turn the watcher and the watched into crude and pitiful human beings. In their respective pasts, the prisoners have all sought out the media’s salacious eye. That the women aren’t particularly pleasant is presumably meant to test our compassion. But this is a boring provocation of a novel, written in a blunt, dead style. The plot can only turn one of two ways. The women wait to be rescued, or they rescue themselves. By the end, the reader is the only one pleading for salvation.

Welcome To Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo (Faber and Faber, £12.99)

This colourful novel depicts Nigeria as an oil-rich country where most of the people are desperately poor. Chike Ameobi serves in the army, but after refusing to shoot innocents he deserts and travels to Lagos. There he becomes a protector of other refugees trying to survive in the city. Just when his new friends discover an abandoned house to live in, they become embroiled in a political scandal. A man called Chief Sandayo turns up in the night, carrying a holdall of money, and demands the squatters leave. Luckily, one of them recognises Sandayo as a missing government minister suspected of embezzlement. Onuzo is a young writer – 25 years old – and it shows. Her sentences are sometimes overwritten and she fails to control the pace of the scenes. But the novel is an intriguing political thriller and on occasion her writing shows real intelligence, digging down into the confusion of Nigerian society to expose the chaos and poverty of corruption.

Not Just Jane by Shelley DeWees (Harper Perennial, £9.99)

This light-hearted history book seeks to inform the common reader about seven female writers excluded from the literary canon between the years 1760 and 1910. Putting Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters to one side, DeWees explores the lives and work of, for example, Sara Coleridge and Helen Maria Williams. She contextualises them within a light feminist reading of literary history. The writers are interesting enough, and there is no doubt they have been unfairly neglected, but Dewees forgets that some literature lasts simply because it is superlative. None of the writers here measure up to someone like George Eliot. The author’s prose is lazy and the tone irritating. Solecisms aside, DeWees insists, for instance, on referring to Jane Austen as "Jane" and uses the sort of passing comments written by bookish teenagers on Facebook. Thus, Samuel Taylor Coleridge becomes a "poet extraordinaire" and Mary Robinson is said to have "smashed it out of the park" during one performance on stage.