Barbara Trapido
Sex and Stravinsky

The time is 1995, but everybody is linked by their past. Australian Caroline can command everyone except her own ghoulish mother, which means that things aren’t easy for Josh and Zoe, her husband and daughter. Meanwhile, on the east coast of Africa, Hattie, Josh’s first love, has taken to writing from the turret of her fabulous house. The book throws up the complexity and richness of the world while, as a sequence of personal stories, it comes together like a dance: a masquerade in which things are not always what they seem.

Lindsey Davis
Nemesis

In the high summer of 77AD, Marcus Didius Falco is beset by personal problems. Newly bereaved and facing unexpected upheavals, it is a relief for him to consider someone else’s misfortunes for a change. A middle-aged couple who supplied statues to his father, Geminus, have disappeared. When a mutilated corpse turns up near Rome, Falco and his vigiles friend Petronius investigate, even though it means travelling in the dread marshes. But just as they are making progress, the Chief Spy, Anacrites, snatches their case away from them.

Joseph O’Connor
Ghost Light

Dublin, 1907. An actress still in her teens begins an affair with a leading playwright. Molly Allgood is a girl of the inner city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. Witty and watchful, she has dozens of admirers. But in the backstage of her life, there is a secret. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled, reticent genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by Edwardian conventions and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives.