Septembers by Christopher Prendergast (Salt, £8.99)
Septembers by Christopher Prendergast (Salt, £8.99)
Prendergast's debut is part love story, part social commentary on an urban world failing its inhabitants like history teacher Matt and his girlfriend Annabel. Prendergast cites Kurt Vonnegut as an influence, and some of that can be seen in the way he moves between the past and the present.
The Burglar Caught By A Skeleton: And Other Singular Tales From The Victorian Press by Jeremy Clay (Icon Books, £8.99)
One of the things that Clay's entertaining collection of the more unusual press stories from the Victorian era highlights is the strong sense of Empire: stories of alligators in people's bedrooms in India, for example, remind us of the 'colonies', and of those who served in them. A fascinatingly different view of history.
Someone by Alice McDermott (Bloomsbury, £8.99)
McDermott weaves beautifully and skilfully between the child Marie and the adult woman she becomes, between 1920s Brooklyn and the war, with an ease that marks all of her fiction. Knowing just how much detail to give and how much to pare back, she makes her slim novel feel as full as a doorstopper.
This Is Scotland: A Country In Words And Pictures by Daniel Gray and Alan McCredie (Luath Press, £9.99)
Gray and McCredie's appealing collection of photographs is accompanied by a lively commentary that seeks to celebrate Scotland, its urban and rural settings, as well as its people, from shopkeepers to kids eating ice-cream. It gives much more than the "fond glimpse and flirty glance" they claim is their aim.
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