The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher (Penguin, £8.99)

Shortly before her untimely death, Carrie Fisher rediscovered a diary written during the making of the first Star Wars film and was moved enough by her teenage self’s angst-ridden confessions to write this memoir around them. This isn’t a book for Star Wars trivia buffs: Mark Hamill and George Lucas get only walk-on parts. It’s dominated, understandably, by her brief affair with the married and much older Harrison Ford, a relationship the pair had kept secret for 40 years. Their liaison lasted only three months, but clearly made an indelible impression on Fisher, an inexperienced and insecure 19-year-old who wasn’t sure at that stage she even wanted to be an actress. Amidst the soul-searching and poetry, young Carrie, swept up in a one-sided affair with the taciturn Ford, shows glimmers of the sharp and witty writer she would in time become. The older and wiser Fisher has learned to be blunt: “I loved him and he allowed it.”

Malacqua by Nicola Pugliese (And Other Stories, £10)

The only novel written by journalist Pugliese, Malacqua was published in 1977 and sold out within days, but was mysteriously withdrawn by the author and only reappeared after his death in 2012. It’s set over four days in Naples, when a deluge of Biblical proportions descends on the city. Buildings collapse and sinkholes open up in the roads. The rain seems to herald something even more extraordinary to come as the inexplicable sound of screeching voices in a deserted building is traced to a strange doll and coins start to produce music. Pugliese trains his attention on a handful of the city’s inhabitants, who, in the apocalyptic mood brought about by the weather, turn inward and look hard at their lives in the anticipation of some transformative event. A book that starts off with vigour and playfulness defies expectations by trailing off into several streams of consciousness which, for all their literary merit, leads to a sense of anti-climax.

Freeman’s: The Future Of New Writing (Grove Press, £10.99)

The inevitable associations with the venerable Freeman’s catalogue are distracting and unfortunate, as this is a much more nourishing, if less practical, volume. It’s the fourth literary anthology to be brought out by former Granta editor John Freeman, and is devoted to introducing readers to 29 new writers, aged between 25 and 70, from 20 countries around the world. These are the people that Freeman believes will be the future of literature, and he’s cast his net so widely partly as a reaction to America’s increasing insularity. His intention, with this mixture of short stories, journalism, novel extracts and a smattering of poetry, is to nudge readers out of their comfort zones, and in this profusion of voices, styles and perspectives there are several stories which take provocative, unexpected turns. It would be unfair to single any out, but without a doubt, at least a few of the writers making their international debuts here will be household names in the near future.