Maddie and Harry: she's an estate agent, he's a teacher. They'll say they live in the Black Country. They'll say how they met Jonathan Cotard, explain how they later argued, had a car accident, thought they'd killed someone. The Black Country. For Maddie and Harry, it's darker than it should be.

After ministering to fallen women in Victorian London, Evelyn has suffered a nervous breakdown and finds herself treated by the Water Doctors in the imposing Wakewater House, a hydropathy sanatorium.

Alice Thompson's new novel is a Gothic story of book collecting, mutilation and madness. Violet is obsessed with the books of fairy tales her husband acquires, but her growing delusions see her confined in an asylum. As she recovers and is realead a terrifying series of events is unleashed.

Burnt island is about a literary novelist, Max Long, who wins a fellowship to Burnt island to write his next novel. He ends up staying with the very successful novelist James Fairfax whose wife had gone missing under mysterious circumstances.

It is a foggy day. Ruby Grummett, a railway crossing keeper, opens the gates for a council lorry, thinking that the Skegness train has been cancelled, but it comes looming through the mists and hits the lorry. The train is derailed, one man is killed, another seriously injured, and Ruby's house is destroyed. But who is to blame?

Deaf at Spiral Park is about a bear that shaves off his fur to join humanity. The antagonist, a recruitment consultant, dies several times, and, ultimately, this teaches her nothing. This is a fresh and original novel which remains accessible and funny in spite of its experimental and philosophical concerns.

The new novel from the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse is a tense and moreish confection of semiotics, suggestibility and creative writing with real psychological depth and, in Bonnie Falls and Sylvia Slythe, two unforgettable characters.

The Fat of Fed Beasts is an ambitious literary mix of existential uncertainty, murder, bureaucracy, unreliable father figures and disaffected policemen. It asks why we do what we do, whether it matters, and what, if anything, our lives are worth. And it's funny.