HOME FIRE by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

Inspired by Sophocles’ Antigone, Shamsie echoes the original’s theme of loyalty to family clashing with loyalty to the state in this Booker-longlisted novel. Isma has been raising her siblings, Aneeka and Parvaiz, since their mother’s death. And now their father has died too, while being transported to Guantanamo. It’s not long before Parvaiz is radicalised, heading to Syria to join Isis. And while Aneeka exploits her relationship with the son of Britain’s first Muslim Home Secretary to try to get Parvaiz back, Isma has a very different reaction. As family bonds are stretched to the limit, each of the main characters gets their place in the spotlight, including the Home Secretary, who has been accused of betraying Muslims with his assimilationist stance. What began as an updating of Sophocles becomes, in Shamsie’s hands, a nuanced depiction of the multifaceted identities of British Asians, and a gripping novel. She’s never been short of ambition, and this book could be her most accomplished yet.

SELFIE by Will Storr (Picador, £9.99)

Behind the never-ending selfies, and the need to document their happiness and popularity on social media, lies the pressure young people are under to aim for a perfection they can never attain. Shocking levels of self-harm, eating disorders, body dysmorphia and suicide are the unhappy consequences. This might be the most self-obsessed generation ever, but what has brought us to this point? Will Storr goes back to ancient Greece to show the flourishing of individualism, not dissimilar to the “supercharged” form we see today, and follows that thread as it develops through Christianity, the Industrial Revolution, the prioritisation of self-esteem in schools and the encounter groups of 1960s California, where it intersects with Ayn Rand and the neoliberal culture she helped foster – the political wing of narcissism, if you like. Storr weaves his own experiences of low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts into an impassioned book which has much more historical and psychological depth than the grumpy putdown the title might suggest.

WILD RIDE TO FREEDOM by William McLellan (Old Street, £8.99)

It was 1972, and McLellan couldn’t get into art school, so he and a mate concocted a scheme to paint all year round in Morocco, living off the money they could make selling acid to hippies. Then he got drunk, stole a scooter and beat up the policeman who arrested him. His home for the next eight months was Barcelona’s Modelo prison. Even if he’s imaginatively filling in a few gaps in his memory, McLellan’s recall after 45 years is incredible. You can almost see the place, right down to the grey soup with its “thick white squares of hairy fat”. Illustrated with pages from his sketchbook, this memoir recounts how he trawled his childhood for clues that might help break his pattern of continually getting into trouble. With his detailed memory and talent for vivid description, he’d have no complaints if he followed this up with a sequel about how he came to make videos for some of music’s biggest stars.