Quest

A girl in a tower. The words trigger instant curiosity. Who is she? Who locked her away, and why? Was it punishment, or sequestration to keep her safe? Thea Lenarduzzi’s The Tower is a literary Russian doll, one story concealed within another, blurring identities, blocking memory. A far from reliable narrator – ‘let’s call her T’ – steers us between fiction and real life while the author herself occasionally amends the telling. Clues are offered as we turn the pages, but we may have misread some of them, or been misled, and the conclusion upends expectations. If this is all beginning to sound rather too Fernando Pessoa, breathe easy. Lenarduzzi’s

Wyl Menmuir’s first novel, The Many, was a surprise inclusion on the 2016 Booker Prize longlist. It drew praise for its discomfiting prose, but the fact that it had been written in a VW camper van on the north Cornish coast — where it was set — also drew attention. The village in The Many appeared to be forgotten by the outside world, and the setting for Fox Fires is similarly isolated. Nineteen-year-old Wren Lithgow arrives in a mysterious European city state called O with her concert pianist mother. The peril they are in isn’t laboured, but the reader realises it by degrees — as Wren does. She was conceived