June by Gerbrand Bakker (Harvill Secker, £12.99)
Bakker's multi-narrator novel isn't an undemanding read, but the fractured structure reflects perfectly what his story is about: the damage done to a family when, on a seemingly innocent day that a Queen visits, a little girl is knocked down and killed. His prose is sparse and clean, and it more than rewards the reader's necessary patience.
Killers Of The King: The Men Who Dared To Execute Charles I by Charles Spencer (Bloomsbury, £8.99)
As uncle to a future king, Spencer might be expected to have a particular agenda with regard to Charles I's execution, especially as his focus in this often exciting history is on the men considered most responsible for it. He recoils from, yet is irresistibly drawn to, their bloody and violent deaths when Royalists take revenge.
In The Approaches by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate, £8.99)
Some of us find Barker's style too breezy and focused on detail to come round to her, but her genius with language is once again on full display in another novel about the eccentricities of a particular English community, in this case when stranger Franklin D Huff arrives to investigate a mystery from the recent past.
Hard Choices by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Simon and Schuster, £10.99)
Clinton's account of her years as Secretary of State suits the magisterial, detailed, not always dispassionate autobiographies we've come to expect of the major political players once they reach high office. There are few real revelations and no serious character insights, and in the end it is the tone that nobly, if less excitingly, carries the day.
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