Ruth Dudley Edwards
Murdering Americans

Being a member of the House of Lords and Mistress of St Martha's College in Cambridge might seem enough to keep anyone busy, but Baroness (Jack) Troutbeck likes new challenges. When a combination of weddings and work deprives her of her closest allies, Jack leaps at an invitation to become a Distinguished Visiting Professor on an American campus. With her head full of romantic fantasies inspired by 1950s Hollywood, she sets off from England. But how will this intellectually­rigorous right-winger cope in the more liberal USA? And, more importantly, can she find out who murdered the Provost - and persuade Robert Amiss to abandon his honeymoon and fly to her side?

Jonathan Coe
The Rain Before it Falls

As 73-year-old Rosamund sits alone in her remote Shropshire house, her dying thoughts turn to her cousin's granddaughter, Imogen, who has been blind from an early age. Rosamund realises that she has one last duty to perform: to describe on tape, for Imogen's benefit, a series of photographs which between them tell a tragic family history. At the centre of the narrative is Imogen's grandmother, Beatrix, whose flight from her husband after the war in search of freedom and excitement left a damaging legacy. But Rosamund's motive in telling the story is not recrimination. Her aim is to recreate and to explain.

When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. Rachel leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work - but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage that will take months to unravel. As the story moves from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s, it draws together the clues to Rachel's life - as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius. Patrick Gale's latest novel shines with intelligence, humour and tenderness.