The Stolen Child

Lisa Carey

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £8.99

It’s 1960, and the inhabitants of St Brigid’s, “perched like a jagged accident above the water” 12 miles off the west coast of Ireland, are being evacuated to council houses on the mainland. Lisa Carey takes us back to a point a year earlier, when an American woman in her late thirties, also named Brigid, comes to the island looking for a miracle: the chance to have a child. She sets up home under the gaze of 23-year-old Emer, who was briefly snatched by fairies as a little girl but was spat back out again. Ever since, the touch of Emer’s hand has brought darkness and depression, but Brigid, who is a healer, remains unaffected. Emer is complex, as are her feelings for Brigid, and as the tale unfolds we begin to see why. Carey creates a convincing world, where myth and reality blend into one another, filling it with foreboding, intrigue and, in Emer, a transfixing central character.

Swallowing Mercury

Wioletta Greg

Portobello, £8.99

A Polish poet now living in Britain, Wioletta Greg presents here a fictional memoir of a girl who seems to be a lot like her, whose childhood is spent in the Soviet-dominated Poland of the 1980s. She lives in the rural community of Hekarty, where life is defined by Catholicism, Communism and traditional folklore. There’s no overarching plot: rather, Swallowing Mercury comprises a series of formative episodes in her journey to adulthood. At various times, Wiola is questioned by an official from Moscow in case one of her paintings has been influenced by subversive adults, the local women gather to make bunting for a visit by Pope John Paul II and she hears a chilling murder confession on a train. Greg conjures up almost palpably the smells and tastes (and harsh winters) of her childhood, as well as Wiola’s imaginative transformation of her surroundings and the stifling mix of political ideology and stubborn tradition she longs to escape.

The House

Simon Lelic

Penguin, £7.99

As soon as they move into their new London home, Jack and Syd begin to suspect that something isn’t quite right. There’s the fact that their offer was accepted over the doubtless higher bids of the more well-heeled applicants, and that the price includes the decades of accumulated junk it contains. Then Jack finds something disturbing in the attic. Only gradually does it dawn on the couple what’s really going on in this disconcerting thriller, which ends up in a very different place from where it started. Syd and Jack take alternate chapters to explain things from their separate perspectives, sometimes bickering across each other’s accounts, each entry showing how their relationship is being put to the test and their new life together collapsing around them. With the introduction of 13-year-old neighbour Elsie, the dominant theme emerges of the damage fathers can inflict upon their children. Gripping and suspenseful, its oppressive atmosphere of darkness and unease enshrouds the reader from the outset.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT