In Losing You (Michael Joseph, £12.99), Nicci French gives a brilliant demonstration of how simple a very good thriller can be: a teenage girl goes missing on the Essex coast; in a single day, her mother tries with increasing desperation to track her down, and in the process finds out more about her daughter than she ever suspected. A book to chill the heart of every parent.

Patrick Marnham

The Laughter of Mothers (Harvill Secker, £12), the latest collection of poems by Paul Durcan, takes us further through the story of his life in Dublin and Mayo, and tells us more about Ireland in the last 60 years than any three-volume history. We meet additional characters from his extraordinary re-imagined reality; his Aunt Sara Mary ‘one of the black, red-roaring fighting Durcans of Mayo’, who ran the family pub, and whose father had been put up against the wall by the IRA in 1923, and his Grand Aunt Maud Gonne, sitting up in bed and ‘sticking out her claws’ to embrace the infant poet before he ran terrified from the room. But this collection is above all a tribute to his gentle mother, who stood by him in times of trouble, and who ended her life leading a sensational break out of three old ladies from the Alzheimer’s home, ‘Driving West and Wearing Gold’.

Blackwell Bookshop

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