Eleanor Marx by Rachel Holmes (Bloomsbury, £12.99)

"Karl Marx was the theory: Eleanor Marx was the practice." Very much her father's child, Holmes shows, in this superbly gripping biography, a woman often brought to the brink of exhaustion by political activity and who made disastrous romantic choices, not least in her partner Edward Aveling, but whose intellectual gifts and compassion were extraordinary.

Outline by Rachel Cusk (Vintage, £8.99)

For all the narrowness of its focus, being primarily a semi-autobiographical novel about a woman writer whose marriage has ended and who is travelling to Athens to teach a writing course, this is probably Cusk's most accessible and in many ways least self-indulgent novel. It shows a welcome psychological curiosity in the behaviour and lives of others.

In Search Of Solace by Emily Mackie (Sceptre, £8.99)

Surprisingly, Mackie missed out on award nominations for a second novel that is a risk, daring in form and content, as she explores the life choices of Jacob Little, and why he has ended up where he is, alone and searching fruitlessly for his ex-girlfriend Solace. Clever and often funny, it's a challenging but often rewarding read.

Dangerous Days On The Victorian Railways by Terry Deary (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £8.99)

Deary, the creator of the Horrible Histories series, has an intriguing alternative history here of double-dealing and worse, beginning with James Watt's suppression of a rival's theories about high pressure steam engines. But his format is chopped-up statement paragraphs, designed for readers with short attention spans and not those who like a seamless narrative.