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Missouri-born and LA-based, Harper has worked in the past as a music journalist and film critic, and now writes for TV (or, more accurately at the moment, strikes for TV). He emerged with a collection of noirish short stories, Love and Other Wounds, in 2015, and quickly established himself as a hard-edged writer in the tradition of James Ellroy or Dashiell Hammett. In 2017 She Rides Shotgun, his follow-up, and first novel, bagged him an Edgar Award.

Reading Everybody Knows – and believe me, you’ll race through it – it’s not hard to see why. Set in Los Angeles, a city in which “nobody talks, but everybody whispers,” it follows Mae Pruett, a so-called “black-bag publicist” who works for a crisis management firm and specialises in disconnecting “power from responsibility”. Need to explain away a black eye the morning you start filming? Call Mae, who’ll find a way of convincing the world it was a cute, overly affectionate dog that did it, not a creep who’d flown you to his yacht for a bit of recreational downtime then got upset when you threw his phone out of the porthole after he started filming your tryst. Stunt goes wrong after a run of sixteen-hour days and a cancelled safety briefing? Trust Mae’s firm to dig up a historical drunk-driving conviction and get the blame shifted to the guy behind the wheel.

Despite her shady work, Mae is enormously likeable. She’s forced to confront the world she works in when her boss – having invited her to join him in a crusade to expose the very worst abusers, in a city that’s full of them – is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. With her insider knowledge of how things really work, Mae refuses to believe the official “carjacking-gone-wrong” theory and embarks on a mission to investigate his murder. This soon begins to unravel when – with the help of Chris, an ex-cop and ex-lover – she quickly ends up in deep water, fighting not just for the truth but for her life.

In many ways this is a novel about LA and its rotten underbelly. Harper describes a city in which homeless camps are being torched and corruption is everywhere. Harvey Weinstein isn’t mentioned, but teenagers chasing the Hollywood dream find themselves invited to all the glamorous parties, and then to the less glam parties-within-parties. When things go bad they somehow end up paying the price, but Mae is the one who finds herself in a position to redress the balance.

Harper has somehow managed to create a beautiful novel about a horrific world. His compelling prose is sparse but needle-sharp and his dialogue is taut as piano wire. It’s a tantalising glimpse into a world that the rest of us, perhaps mercifully, don’t get to see, and the denouement moves beyond the glitzy world of entertainment to expose the corruption at all levels of modern society. Brilliant.

S J Watson is the award-winning author of the bestselling psychological thrillers “Before I Go To Sleep”, “Second Life” and “Final Cut”. Follow him on Twitter at @sj_watson

Idealism is a tricky one, isn’t it? So necessary, so demanding, so volatile, when you have it in you. There’s little an idealist can consciously do to control the hopes, fears and desires they have for the world. The generation of idealists that came through WWII were a particular breed: forged in the indisputable moral furnace of straightforward goodies and baddies, they came out into a world where, the baddies once vanquished, the flaws of the good guys quickly became manifest.

Natasha Walter’s parents were children during the War. Her mother Ruth, daughter of refugees from Nazi Germany, was a teacher and social worker; her father was Nicholas Walter, the anarchist, secularist, humanist writer. Both were activists. It is of her mother that Walter writes in this steel magnolia of a memoir.

Walter is known as a feminist writer, a novelist, founder of the charity Women For Refugee Women, activist with Extinction Rebellion and their writers’ wing, Writers Rebel. She puts her money where her mouth is: she’s been arrested and had online abuse. She was brought up with the sharp end of idealism: in the ’60s and ’70s her parents were members of anti-war groups, marchers at Aldermaston, writers of pamphlets, setters-up of groups, no strangers to arrest and police violence. In 1963 they were among the eight Spies For Peace who broke into Regional Seat of Government Number 6, a secret bunker the government had built to shelter “a small elite” in the case of nuclear war. And Ruth’s father, Georg, had been involved in anti-Nazi resistance in Germany in the 1930s, was imprisoned for three years and went on the run across Europe.

These family histories, dramatic and beautifully presented, are the groundsoil of the book, though, not the crop. At the heart of all these strands of the political and personal, the historical and domestic, sits a big tragedy: Ruth, Walter’s mother, killed herself.

The way she did it makes sense, on an idealistic level. Why should a person not? If of sound mind and deciding that all things considered the time is right for them? Ruth had planned her death well in advance. She feared dementia and was certain it was developing in her. She had worked in palliative care, seen its terrors and deficiencies. Walter, looking back, realised that she too feared her mother’s dementia, to such a degree that she denied it, and thus deafened herself to what her mother was telling her. Including that she had plans to end her life.

And on the other hand, how could she? When Ruth had daughters and grandchildren, comparative health and sunny days, the stubborn beauty of life? How can a person inflict such pain? Even when we all know the pain is coming down the line, to control the timing of it is a mightily audacious act.

This is a potent book. We often see activism from the outside: we read about it and witness its effect, or lack of effect, on the outside world. We nod wisely seeing that children of activists become activists, or enemies of activism – how interesting, so many variables. It’s hard when your parents seem to love principles more than they do you. But it is very unusual to have a writer of Walter’s calibre take us right into generations of family experience, not just from a political/ historical point of view, but also from inside the family, from inside the hearts of the members of the family.

Activists usually act out of love for humanity, or justice, or the planet, or all three (though their idealistic motives are often obscured or misrepresented by our status-quo society). But they also possess all the complexities of character, desire, guilt, fear, sacrifice and resentment that everyone else has. Walter spreads it out before us with great tenderness, exquisite writing, clear eyes and an open heart.

If nothing else (and there is plenty else) it makes me wish there were another word, other than suicide, with its echoes of desperation and violence, to describe a person’s rational, if unbearable, decision to time their own departure.  

There is a temptation, when reviewing a novel where the writer has demonstrated their virtuosity with multiple timelines and voices, to focus on the technique at the expense of the narrative, skipping over the quality of the language and the way the author spins golden characters from the dry straw of words lined up. In the case of Anam, that urge is heightened by the fact it is André Dao’s debut. This is some writer, but his facility with the tricks of the trade is a side point.

Anam’s book is about memory and memories – our own and those of our families – and how we reckon with and bear witness to them. It shifts – like a literary version of the ’90s sci-fi drama Quantum Leap – from Dao, with his partner Lauren, and baby daughter, Edith, at Cambridge University, to eras and locations across Australia, Vietnam, and France. It is a disorienting experience; you emerge blinking into the light, finding yourself miles and years from where the previous chapter or page had placed you.

Autofiction – the fictionalisation of reality with slight or even extreme flourishes – can be deeply solipsistic but Dao does not fall into that trap. This is an exquisite quilt of family experiences; voices rise and fall in the narrative, and the character of “André Dao” is startled from the warm bath of his melancholic nostalgia by cold water poured into it by the novel’s version of “Lauren”: “The elegiac is apolitical… It sucks the air out of the anger and righteousness you need to change things. It makes a useful thing – a memory of injustice – into a pretty bauble.”

The central narrative thread of Anam is the family’s painful wait for Dao’s grandfather – a Catholic academic who fell foul of Vietnam’s Communist government – to finally be released from prison after a long ten years. The battle with papers, recollections, recriminations and clashing memory, as well as Dao’s own questions about why he is even writing the book – can it help him know his grandfather? – produces not a bitter pill of frustration but a beautiful meditation on the past and our relationship with it.

Informed by Turner’s artistic vision and the spectre of the Green Lady, Bayley’s lyrical text bewitches, exploring the ways a life may be illuminated, how women have found expression, and what it means to be a writer – this writer.

The Green Lady’s protagonist-self seeks the story of her grandmother, who danced on the sands of Shoreham, where Turner created light-soaked landscapes. On the way, she touches on other stories, including that of suffragist Mary Neal.

Nothing is explicit; connotations are pursued with dream logic, while the exploration’s object shifts perspective, dissolves into the haze of a Turner painting, to emerge as something else. Even as the reader begins to perceive a textual device, the artist is acknowledging the artistry, drawing the reader in, making them complicit: “Mary is a composite character…”. The borders between perception and creation blur as real people are reimagined as fiction, and fictional ones are freed to walk among the living.

The author dreams of writing a train journey, of writing – or dreaming – herself into being. On another train, a lady vanishes.

During 1987’s gale, a witch-like tree falls. We wake into the storm; Cyril, who loved cows, died in it, his brother Alec, armed with a chainsaw, hacking vainly through fallen trees to attempt a rescue. Alec is mythologised, becoming Beowulf’s ætheling-born as, with his chainsaw, he negotiates “unknown ways, headlands sheer and the haunts of the Nicor.” Sometimes, we become stories.

Bayley’s text is a tide, swirling round characters, exploring them, ebbing to leave flotsam (a button factory, a handbag, a vanishing photograph: ‘in the end, we all vanish’). The undertow hints at children orphaned, lost, hanged, starved, fallen, drowned (“Gladys, come back”) – and the dazzle on its surface is the hazy mist in which chronology and detail dissolve.

Throughout, the Green Lady is evident, “a woman with a heart full of children”. The reader is invited to participate in an act of perception that is almost creation, spinning a story from inference between the wide perspective of the painter and the fierce focus of the writer.

The painter is concerned with “the sky…everything turning into light”. It is the writer who uses that hazy light to throw the characters, for a moment, into brilliant relief, before they dissolve back into art. The Green Lady is, above all, a work of transcendence. A patchwork of novel, anti-memoir, visual imagery, song, it transcends genre.

If the definition of a man were a heroic figure who stands up for truth and justice, even if it means being imprisoned, beaten and bearing the deaths of friends and family, then Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was the ultimate man.

In the 1970s and 1980s he relentlessly used the power of his music as a weapon against Nigeria’s military dictatorships and post-colonial corruption. But there is an issue here: Afolayan and Falola call it the “woman question” and draw a parallel with contemporary US black radicals: “The Black Panther Party projected an ideology of liberation that was fundamentally masculine. The possibility of liberation was hinged on a politics of virile manhood that has the capacity to snatch the initiative from white oppressors.”

A man with 28 wives and countless lovers, Fela appeared similarly macho: “There must be a master. Men are the masters, not women. It’s part of the natural order for women to be submissive to man.”

But the authors try to put his words in an African context: “It was expected that chiefs and monarchs would be polygynous as a mark of status. But even more so, the agrarian nature of most pre-colonial African societies required a pragmatic economic consideration. Polygyny ensured availability of labour to increase material wealth.”

Fela justified (and his first wife bore gracefully) his marriage to his 27 singers and dancers: “It was for him an authentic act. How else could he have behaved as an African man? Monogamy was un-African, even unnatural…

“[But] while it may be far-fetched to accuse [him] of misogyny… to conclude that women were just passive receptacles for masculine whims and caprices, as Fela did, is to distort the dynamics of symbiosis that characterised male-female relations in most traditional African societies.”

Despite the “woman question”, Fela was undeniably a cultural and political colossus who walked his talk like no other protest singer dared. Ironically, he inherited much of his radical strength from his activist mother (who died after soldiers threw her from an upper window) – and his own death came prematurely not at the hands of the military but from AIDS.

The authors are academics not pop writers, so Fela fans may find their language clunky. But it’s well worth sticking with the occasionally jargon-heavy prose to appreciate the importance of this man – for music, for Africa and for an insight into the conundrums of masculinity.

In the Torah, when Moses’ sister, Miriam, becomes ill with leprosy, he calls to God with what is now considered Judaism’s first healing prayer: Ana El Na R’fa Na La (“Please God, I ask, hear her now.”). It is beautiful and short. At 272 pages, Hila Blum’s novel How to Love Your Daughter is not that short, but it is nearly as beautiful.

When the opening section of the book was published as a short story in The New Yorker in May 2023, Blum said: “… I was struck by the multitude of daily decisions that parenting demands, and by the impossibility of predicting their long-term effect.”

Blum writes with the tender painfulness of a bruise just maturing to a sad purple. From the opening page of the novel, you are inside the mind of Yoella – the mother – as she deals with the feelings that come from estrangement from her daughter, Leah, and that it also means being cut off from her granddaughters. We meet Yoella as she is spying on Leah in a suburban neighbourhood.

The prose is sparse but is heavy with emotion, the skeleton of a fruit tree bearing a large crop. Sentences strike you hard, without any sense of smugness: “[It] was not how I remembered my daughter – I was stunned by the power of her presence. I whispered her name… just to make sense of what I was seeing.”

How to Love Your Daughter isn’t an easy read as a parent; every page is a provocation about your own choices, decisions, and failings. When Blum wrote the novel, her daughter was seven; my stepdaughter is thirteen. The self-questioning only becomes more fraught as they move further from your immediate reach and make mistakes you can’t fix with a kiss on the forehead and a quick burst of reassurance.

This is a beautiful book but it’s beautifully sad. It will not add to the simple heat of a beach holiday; it will place a shadow in your peripheral vision, whispering like a slave to a Roman emperor: “Will your child judge you a good parent? And is there anything you can do to change that judgement?”

I’d like to start by telling you what The Wren is, and why it needs to appear twice in the title – but I can’t. There’s a lot of birds in this fine novel, but to be honest it’s the bullfinch and the origami ones that stick more in my mind: the bold existentialism and fragility of the former, the child’s naked need represented by the latter.

This latest novel by Anne Enright, the first ever Laureate for Irish Literature (2015-18) and winner of the Man Booker in 2007 for The Gathering, isn’t wandering far from her usual fields of family, motherhood and Irishness. But when those fields bring up such crops, you really don’t need to wander. The Wren, The Wren introduces us to three protagonists, of three generations. Carmel is the mother, in the middle. Her thoroughly modern daughter Nell is running and searching, but does she actually want to find anything? And Phil, Carmel’s father, is the raging poet, the love object, the seedy, the unsatisfactory, the gone. If we gave loving mother Carmel a blue cloak, wayward Nell waist-length red hair and Celtic Poet Phil an old tweed coat of his father’s as he stands in a wet potato field, we’d be right there in the heart of Oirish cliché. But this is Enright, a writer of depth and delicacy. Who else could exercise and exorcise clichés with such deft grace? Or make such a balanced meal out of acknowledging, lampooning, understanding, undermining and actually being the very cake she’s at once having, eating and lovingly presenting to the reader? Yeah, OK, Beckett.

From the non-fiction Making Babies in 2004 to the wonderful Actress (2020), Enright writes, in her own words, “rocking the pram with one hand and typing with the other.” The mother/daughter relationship is hers: its perils and blessings and how we can take it for granted even as we scorn it. Fathers are not so present – though their absence is.

Here’s something she wrote after her own father died, in 2016: “I mourned the loss, not just of my father, but also of some ideal man, the right-thinking judge, the ultimate authority… I also had to question why, even though I was a woman and a feminist, my idea of authority – in some lovely, daughterly way – tilted male. Perhaps these contradictory feelings were both aspects of the same childlike need: please, let there be someone in charge … It was time to grow up. It was also time to be the figure I needed in my life … to judge things, not as I wanted them to be, but as they were. It was time I stopped looking upwards, for the big man who wasn’t there.”

Phil the poet is a classic big man who wasn’t there; his very absence an entity in its own right. But as the bullfinch lets us know: you can’t make someone be what they’re not. The bird just is.

I still don’t see why the bullfinch wasn’t the wren though. Maybe the wren is women. Or maybe it’s not that simple. 

“Megan Barker’s debut novel Kit is an extended prose-poem, in which the first-person narrator Megan tells the story of the loss of her friend Kit (addressed throughout as “you”) to mental illness and suicide. The novel opens in Glasgow in 1998, where Kit and Megan meet. Although their apparently platonic relationship is full of youthful enthusiasm, a descent into the underworld of the city’s dank subway seems to anticipate Kit’s subsequent unravelling. After this brief introduction, the narrative skips to “January last year”. Over the months that follow, Megan charts Kit’s decline against the backdrop of her own unhappy marriage and loss of sense of self. Kit himself is curiously absent from the narrative. Although Megan addresses him throughout, his perspective is withheld, and the nature and origins of his despair are hinted at but never fully articulated; readers must reach their own conclusions from the novel’s condensed and often elliptical language.

The narrative is interwoven with beautifully observed vignettes of domestic life. The ambivalence and exhaustion of motherhood is acutely realised. Megan addresses her sleeping children “Can’t you just lie here asleep for ever? Must you all want things? Must you have demands and opinions and needs and feelings? Can’t you just succumb to the massive authority of my love and of my need for you to be quiet and still and hot and alive but not moving, not wanting?” Against this backdrop, Kit – described at one point as “the place where possibility lies” – seems to embody Megan’s youth and freedom. “I mourn all that wide-open space we spent,” she tells him, “all those blank tapes, squandered. Blissfully ignorant were we that soon the sky would be full of drawing pins and little flags.” The novel’s focus is as much on Megan’s loss, despair and anguish as Kit’s.

The banality and beauty of love and loss are beautifully rendered. Too tired to understand a book of poetry, Megan tucks it against her chest, a “poultice of words”. Her wrists are “rimy with wiped away snot bracelets and tears secreted up my sleeve.” Barker resists the urge to over-explain, leaving the reader to piece together events from a fragmentary and mosaic-like narrative. Language veers between the brutal and the delicate. Its subject notwithstanding, this is not a bleak book; despair is interleaved with comedy and tenderness. Kit is a book that will reward savouring and rereading.