Living With A Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich (Granta, £9.99)
Ehrenreich's memoir reveals a deeply intense and serious child from an atheist household who grew up into a teenager who experienced what felt at the time like something mystical: when an object would challenge her perception of it. Some psychiatric treatment ensued but her exploration of it is both moving and intellectually stimulating.
The Storms Of War by Kate Williams (Orion, £7.99)
Historians don't always make the best novelists, although they do know how to choose a popular theme. Williams picks the Edwardian summer, that supposedly Edenic time just before the First World War, for a very gossipy, dialogue-driven and rather predictable tale with spirited heroines and noble youths, about the deWitts of Stonethorpe Hall. First in a series.
The Iceberg by Marion Coutts (Atlantic, £8.99)
Coutts's husband, art critic Tom Lubbock, who died from a brain tumour four years ago, is also an artist. This high-octane account of the two years leading up to her husband's death is written in thoughtful prose and much concerned with language, as her baby learns to talk just as her husband's vocal abilities wane. Powerful and demanding.
Dark Aemilia: A Novel Of Shakespeare's Dark Lady by Sally O'Reilly (Myriad Editions, £8.99)
O'Reilly takes the intriguing life of a real woman, Aemilia Lanyer, widely believed to be England's first published woman poet as well as the 'Dark Lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets and, with a well-paced and vital narrative, turns it into a living, breathing drama with plenty of authentic sounds and smells form the period. A dark, intelligent read.
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