Pictures Of You by Rory MacLean (Bone Idle, £12)

Given the run of a vast photo archive, MacLean chose one photograph from each decade of the 20th century and, once he’d established all the available facts, set his imagination to work and wrote short stories which would “let them live again”. His subjects vary from a Burmese palmist who gets involved with a plan to drive out British colonists to a Native American journalist reporting on the occupation of Alcatraz who almost cracks in the face of the strange forces surrounding the rock. In a story inspired by a production still from Dr Strangelove, a script girl regrets her one-night stand with Peter Sellers, while in Cameroon, Mongo tries to keep ancient traditions alive when his modernising father dies. It’s an interesting, and largely successful, marriage of fiction and journalism, and with a couple of exceptions the subjects of these stories are mostly underdogs, the author reaching back across the years with curiosity and compassion.

This Census-taker by China Miéville (Picador, £7.99)

A fable from an unspecified place at some point in the future, this novella begins with a young boy running from his mountain home down to a town of hungry people and abandoned buildings, screaming that his father has killed his mother. Without enough evidence to be certain, he’s sent back to his father’s house, where they live in an uneasy truce while the boy plots to run away. It takes the arrival of an enigmatic census-taker to break the deadlock. Miéville’s novella thrives on ambiguity. Is his father really killing people and disposing of them down a hole in a cave, or is it the boy’s overactive imagination? What are the unexplained keys? The society that this vignette takes place in, particularly its city of bureaucrats, has clearly been carefully thought through but left deliberately vague. What we get is an evocative story haunted by sadness and loss, its untold mysteries leaving us feeling intrigued rather than cheated.

Moonstone by Sjón (Sceptre, £8.99)

This slim volume is set in Reykjavik in 1918, with the Katla volcano erupting and the Spanish Flu epidemic about to hit Iceland. Máni Steinn is young, gay and marginalised, and when he’s not having sex with men for money he’s to be found in the cinema, as bewitched by the new medium of film as he is by local motorbike-riding girl Sola G—, who epitomises glamour for him. As Máni helps out during the flu epidemic, film imagery starts to leak out of his dreams and into real life – while he, conversely, feels indistinct, as though he’s fading away. It’s an intelligently written book, with many subtleties waiting to be coaxed out of the text, and turns out in the end to have been an elegiac and personal work for the author, but he doesn’t give us much reason to care about Máni, so for much of its length Moonstone can struggle to keep the reader engaged.