Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift (Scribner, £8.99)

The servants have been let off for the day and their employers are gathering in Henley to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials of Paul Sheringham and his fiancée. It’s the last opportunity for a tryst between gentleman Paul and maid Jane Fairchild before his marriage closes the book on their seven-year affair forever. This unseasonably bright and warm Sunday is charged with meaning, Jane absorbing every detail of the day that marks the end of an affair and the beginning of her future. Even 50 years later, it’s seared indelibly onto her brain, and Swift conveys the heady atmosphere of languor and sensuality masterfully, with some captivating dreamlike imagery, like Jane’s naked wander through the Sheringham’s empty house. The vividness of it all, the significance bestowed on seemingly mundane details, is extraordinary. The novella turns out to be the perfect length for this story, allowing Swift to explore the nuances of each moment while preserving the intensity of the experience.

The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay (Melville House, £9.99)

The Mirror Thief throws up questions from the outset. Isn’t this a book about 16th-century Venice? Then why are we in Las Vegas, where a casino owner has hired Gulf War veteran Curtis Stone to track down a gambler named Stanley Glass? It turns out that the story takes place across three iterations of Venice: the original city, Venice Beach in 1958 and the Venetian Casino in Las Vegas in the early 21st century. In 1958, we see the young Stanley Glass, a street hustler, becoming obsessed with the poetry book The Mirror Thief and falling under the influence of its author, Adrian Welles. Finally, in 1592, we find the inspiration for Welles’s poetry in the shape of a man named Crivano, who plans to sneak the jealously-guarded secret of mirror-making out of Venice. Full of thought-provoking digressions and events reflected across eras, this is reminiscent of David Mitchell, a big book with big ideas which Seay pulls off most impressively.

In Gratitude by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury, £9.99)

As a writer with a strong autobiographical streak, Jenny Diski felt compelled to keep a record of her experiences after she was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and fibrosis in 2014. Her account of her induction into “Cancer World”, the loss of control and the grimness of the treatment is devastating. But she also took the opportunity to look back to when she, as a troubled teenager, was taken in by Doris Lessing and lived with her for four years, up to the age of 19, as something less than a foster-daughter and more than a lodger. It’s a period of her life she had never broached before, and Lessing’s attitudes to her young ward come across as very odd and contradictory. If Diski was worried about producing just another cancer memoir with nothing to add to what others had already written, she needn’t have been. With her blunt honesty and ineradicable prickliness, she was, right up to the end, defiantly individual.