We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver (Serpent's Tail, £7.99)
Eva Katchadourian - smart, successful, liberal, blissfully happy in an unlikely partnership with her all-American, uber-patriotic husband Franklin - had always entertained some ambivalence about having a child. By the time their son was born she had actively begun to resent the intrusion, and, as if engaged in a silent pact, Kevin - from menacing infant to mendacious teenager - more than lived up to his mother's bewildered animosity. Yet even Eva could not have envisaged that he would, just before he turned 16, achieve notoriety by shooting dead seven of his fellow school pupils and two members of staff. In a series of letters to the now estranged Franklin, punctuated with mutually hostile prison visits to their incarcerated offspring, Eva painstakingly unravels the long history of Kevin's upbringing. Lionel Shriver's erudite, mordant, Orange Prize-winning novel cleverly balances the grand guignol and the mundane, using Eva's increasingly unreliable narrative to pose urgent questions of nature/ nurture, gender politics, and the blame culture of contemporary America. Catherine Taylor
Skinner's Drift, by Lisa Fugard (Penguin, £7.99)
Following a lengthy self-imposed exile, Eva van Rensburg returns to her native South Africa on a reluctant visit to her once-feared, now cruelly incapacitated father, Martin. It is 1997; 10 years earlier she had fled the country after her mother's violent death on Skinner's Drift, their remote farm on the banks of the Limpopo river. Then, the seeming invincibility of apartheid-ridden South Africa had begun to fragment into terror and turbulence; now racial integration and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hold sway. Yet everywhere the truce is uneasy, particularly at Skinner's Drift. Old scores between Martin and his African workers have to be settled, for they - and Eva - share a terrible secret which can no longer be suppressed. Lisa Fugard's suspenseful debut encapsulates both the country's recent past and the resentments and rivalries of a society on the brink of cataclysmic change, while producing an unforgettable evocation of the beauty and remorselessness of its landscape, with the harsh observation that "nothing dies peacefully in this part of the world". CT
A Long Long Way, by Sebastian Barry (Faber, £7.99)
Sebastian Barry's Booker-shortlisted novel of the Irish experience of the first world war is worth all the approbation it has received. It is gripping, passionate, technically flawless, bitter and horrifying. We follow the fortunes of Willie Dunne, a member of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, from his home town to the muddy trenches of Flanders. Dunne lives through most of the great horrors of the conflict. Barry uses his central character to look at two key historical events with fresh eyes - the war, and the 1916 Easter rising. The experience of the ordinary Irish soldier is a relatively untold story, and Barry explores what it meant to be fighting for a cause that wasn't necessarily your own. However, Willie views the events in Dublin first hand, and his disquiet at seeing a new kind of "enemy" communicates clearly the utter confusion of the time. The effect could be dissipated through familiarity (trenches, gas, random deaths, going over the top), but Barry manages to infuse everything with a kind of innocent incomprehension that makes what happens all the more wrenching. Jerome de Groot
White, by Marie Darrieussecq (Faber, £6.99)
This slight novel is a nuanced account of the effects of isolation. White recounts the particular experiences of two people - a heating engineer and a radio operator - who are part of the team engaged in the setting up of the first permanent European base in Antarctica. Darrieussecq is not overconcerned with narrative but uses the wilderness adroitly to reflect on selfhood. The two principal characters, Edmée and Peter, are from different geographical and cultural backgrounds, and the loneliness of the polar environment affects them in various ways; they both, however, end up withdrawing into themselves. The novel is good on the day-to-day boredom of solitude, the irritating dangers of the extreme cold, and the way that being totally divorced from the world can be both devastating and slowly miraculous. It is a meditation on memory and self-definition; in the blankness of Antarctica there are few points to orientate oneself. That said, the ice is not simply "white" but contains multitudes, from confusing atmospheric phenomena to the story of the earth itself. Darrieussecq's language is stripped down but still manages to be gorgeous. JDG
El Borbah, by Charles Burns (Fantagraphics, £10.99)
It would be far better if we lived in a world where a slightly chubby man named El Borbah could solve crimes dressed in a one-piece wrestling suit, armed with little more than an obvious crotch bulge and a lack of social graces. These five noir comics, culled from the pages of Heavy Metal magazine from 1982 onwards, feature the crime-solving creation that grew out of Burns's childhood fascination with Mexican wrestlers. In each episode, it's obvious Burns's mind has been set free to create scenarios Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett couldn't get near - say, murderous cryogenic heads attached to the bodies of infants. Burns never lets his madness slip into stupidity; like the masters he knows a good noir is greased along by a few genuine twists. El Borbah is most interested in "beer and chow" and his hot-rod car, but he finds time to solve cases with his wrestler's machismo and overblown putdowns. It's utterly ridiculous fun. Burns's ink work and his style have now been imitated by a generation of upstarts. This is a reminder that crime doesn't necessarily need to be solved by people wearing trousers. Craig Taylor
