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In 2020, after spending twenty years working in marketing and corporate PR, Guildford-based Jacqueline Sutherland took the plunge and signed up for a course at the Faber Academy where, seemingly effortlessly, she wrote her debut, The Coffin Club. Dubbed “romantic noir” on its publication in 2022, that book skilfully wrapped a compelling thriller inside an equally compelling love story, and it went on to be hailed Thriller of the Month in the Observer.

It is from auspicious starts such as these that failure is all too often wrought, when publishers rush out not-quite-ready second novels to capitalise on early success. Sutherland has skilfully avoided this fate, even though Twin Truths followed just a year later. She has taken everything that made her debut so good, such as mixing genres, and ratcheted it up a notch or three, adding new tricks to her repertoire.

Belle is a year-round sea-swimmer living in Southwold with her teenage twin daughters and a husband with whom she is still very much in love. Excitedly preparing for the girls first visit home since leaving for university, she’s disappointed when Kit invites her charming new boyfriend, photographer Ivo, to spend Christmas with them too. But since he has no family, what else can she do but buy a bigger turkey, roll up her sleeves and welcome him into their home?

Confident and charismatic, Ivo wins everyone over, but it’s not long before – for Belle at least – cracks begin to appear in his too-good-to-be true persona. Ivo seems to know a little too much about her past than he should, and her suspicions quickly mount that he’s not who he claims to be. He might, in fact, hold the grenade that could blow her family and her life apart. Her growing misgivings are outpaced only by the speed with which Kit is clearly falling for this enigmatic boyfriend. Belle is faced with thorny moral dilemmas she will have to resolve if she is to avoid losing everything.

Sutherland is masterful at the slow build. Ivo’s hold over the family begins with an innocently mispronounced name (“Nobody calls me Bella. Not any more.”), but the dominos begin to fall as Kit reveals a pierced navel, threatens a tattoo and then plans to drop out of university. Never has the phrase “Cauliflower’s a bit soggy” carried so much menace.

Make no mistake, this is a character-led novel, so if high-octane thrills are your thing perhaps look elsewhere. But for me Sutherland has peopled this multi-layered book with a satisfyingly rich and intriguing cast – including Belle’s mother-in-law, who lives in the granny flat downstairs and with whom she has a fractious relationship. From one woman’s seemingly impossible predicament Sutherland has woven a compelling tale of guilt, motherhood, desire and revenge. Highly recommended.

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

Many stories linger after reading Beastly: the man writing at his desk as a beaver mutters in her sleep on his lap. The wild boar among the cabinets and candelabras of a Polish cottage, like something Leonora Carrington dreamed up. The Devon sheep farmer turning round his slaughter-bound lorry of lambs and driving to an animal sanctuary. And Bill Hamilton, a biologist who asked to be consumed, after his death, by an enormous scarab beetle in the Amazon. “I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee,” he wrote. “I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.”

Beastly promises “a new history of animals and us” and so it is – a polyphony in which tale after tale accumulates and the voice of an often awestruck author rounds each one up like so many cats. Actually, “herding cats” is the wrong image for what Carew is up to. Her leaps around the world from story to story only seem skittish if you are not paying attention. This is a cunningly structured book, not unlike Ulrich Raulff’s cultural history Farewell to the Horse in the intelligence of its vaults between examples.

Carew leads us through (mainly Western) human relationships with animals from prehistory to Aristotle, Descartes, Linnaeus, Darwin and beyond, to the horrors of B F Skinner’s behaviourism and our ecocidal, pandemic-stricken Anthropocene. From the beginning, she is clear that our lack of imagination and greed are devastating for animals: “Wherever we showed up, extinction followed.”

But this is no dirge: the book is exhilaratingly busy with ideas, with a great deal of reading concealed iceberg-like under bracing, conversational asides. Carew can zoom out to cover millennia or theology but will soon zoom back in to tell a story like that of Zabka the boar, living with the Polish zoologist Simona Kossak and a “narcissist” raven called Korasek in the vast Białowieża Forest, or Nadezhda, a Russian cockroach who became the first Earthling to conceive in space.

There are vivid words too: “my heart crunched into a walnut,” “a king emptied into a bird,” a tardigrade resembling “a stack of inside-out puffer jackets”. The numbers swarm: nineteen tons of Ancient Egyptian cat mummies turned into fertiliser for English fields, the millions of square miles of ocean covered by an albatross, the 1,992 invertebrates on a single Kent marsh, tardigrades surviving pressures of 6,000 atmospheres, a moth with an eleven-inch tongue. Beastly is greedy for the creaturely kingdom, scooping in facts like a humpback whale engulfing a cloud of krill.

By the end both the reader and Carew are exasperated but energised. Despite individuals like Hamilton or Kossak who have understood and made a difference, humans remain the problem as extinctions rise. “It’s not the horseshoe bats, or chickens, or swine who need to change their behaviour. It’s us. All we have to do is to stop doing it.” Why, she demands, not unreasonably, “can’t hedge-funders fund the blooming hedges?” and, more furiously, “STOP PISSING ABOUT WITH SPACESHIPS TO MARS.”

Her proposal is a sort of natural kintsugi, the Japanese art of rejoining the broken: the wild animals that thrive in the “dead” zone between North and South Korea or along the line of the Iron Curtain; sea conservation areas; farmer Yacouba Sawadogo’s regreening of Burkina Faso. Why not, Beastly asks us, create “a common wealth of gardens. Let growth be green and for bigger ambitions. Bigger courage. Bigger care. Bigger responsibility. Bigger love.” If we can, like Hamilton, admit that we are inseparable from our beastly cousins, perhaps we can pull it off after all.

The horrifying scenes from Hamid Karazai International Airport that were beamed around the world when Kabul fell to the Taliban on 15 August 2021 are not easily forgotten. It takes a certain desperation to cling to the landing gear of transport aircraft to escape one’s own homeland. Images of men and women plummeting from the sky were a gruesome echo of 9/11, the event which drove NATO’s failed mission in Afghanistan to eliminate terrorism.

But in Escape from Kabul, Levison Wood’s latest book, co-written with Geraint Jones, we come to understand that the scale of the humanitarian tragedy was far greater, and the situation far more complex militarily and logistically than any news coverage could convey in soundbites. Operation Pitting was a nightmare.

The swiftness with which the capital was recaptured came as a shock to those on the ground despite there being a clear deadline for withdrawal, as set out in NATO’s 2020 Doha Agreement with the Taliban. The demotivation of the Afghan forces and the shameful disappearance of Ashraf Ghani in a helicopter (some claim with $169m of misappropriated funds) only hastened the collapse. However the lack of a clear strategy and the apparent disinterest of holidaying MPs when it came to evacuating British nationals and eligible Afghan civilians is difficult to fathom.

Both authors have personal experience of serving in Afghanistan, which offers richness and depth to this account; though with such a complex history and a social structures based on ethnic and tribal lines, it’s clear very few people would claim to understand the country. They interviewed not only veterans, international journalists, civilians and politicians, but also members of the Taliban. These testimonies offer an astonishingly honest appraisal of what went wrong during NATO’s twenty-year mission and the chaotic evacuation that ended it.

What stands out is the pivotal role played by service men and women in impossible conditions which looked set to escalate into a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Controlling crowds of civilians was a more volatile situation than a battlefield. That they saved so many lives is inspiring. Their courage, initiative, humanity and tenacity of purpose strikes a powerful, positive note in a book that also shows humans at their very worst.

In 1963 a young geologist with no forestry training was taking dating samples from ancient bristlecone pines in Nevada. He decided he couldn’t examine one aged tree without taking it down. “Instead of letting the mystery be,” says Farmer, “he asked for a wood cutting permit. The district ranger phoned his boss, who gave the okay.” The tree turned out to be 4,900 years old, the oldest known living thing on earth – destroyed.

Ostensibly a book about the planet’s longest-lived inhabitants, this is really an exploration of all-encompassing time, the ephemeral existence of humanity and our tendency towards thoughtless destruction.

Using mind-boggling chronology, Farmer, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, makes it clear we are here for only a moment. But, he argues, we can still choose between doing harm or good. Ancient trees – and our interactions with them – have much to teach us.

Many past interactions have been shocking – whether with sequoia, pine, cedar, kauri or baobab – because humans increasingly abandoned veneration for exploitation.

In 1855 a vast Californian sequoia was butchered to be reconstructed and shown in New York and at London’s Crystal Palace (where it perished in a fire in 1866). In 1950 another one made the mistake of leaning towards a Sequoia National Park cabin; within six hours, the 2,222-year-old tree was felled.

Forest clearances for cultivation at least have a purpose, but some have verged on apocalyptic. In a “mass botanical eldercide” in mid-nineteenth century Chile, hundreds of multimillennial trees were wiped out. “The fire burned so hot that the soil changed, rendering the land useless for crops as well as trees.”

Loggers, moneymakers and careless tourists have all taken their toll, but so have scientists and researchers. Farmer says the existence of millennia-old trees once helped bind successive generations together and put individual human lifespans in perspective; ignoring or destroying them is symptomatic of today’s selfish short-termism.

“Capitalism may be averse to obligations across generations but,” says Farmer optimistically, “capitalism is hardly the sum of humanity.” Elderflora is a plea for us to return to venerating and respecting nature for our future – otherwise we will have none.

Philip Hensher’s latest novel, To Battersea Park, is deftly divided into four parts. Even the title of the first, The Iterative Mood, had me reaching for a reference book and girding my literary loins… But I was unnecessarily apprehensive. Though the novel is complex and continually forces you to play catch-up it’s so carefully crafted that whenever you feel derailed Hensher skilfully guides you back on track.

“The State gave an order. We obeyed the order. Everyone obeyed the order. And the world changed.” A chillingly enticing opening. Surely, I was entering an Orwellian dystopian novel? But no… not yet. After all, this is the iterative mood – a seemingly simple story about a middle-class couple in an unassuming urban house in locked-down Britain.

Hensher masterfully recreates the pandemic years that I was lucky enough to inhabit. Plants grow undisturbed, pigeons return to diets of cherry buds (instead of vomit) and foxes quietly claim the streets. Solace is found in repetition and a “rediscovery of what had once been ordinary”: reading, walking, making “a sort of bread”. Reminiscent of the days before travel, people live in small, insular communities and a daily walk to the gates of Battersea Park represents “the world outside”. We meet the gay couple next door, the Stalinist across the street, the inconsiderate jogger, Marianne from Grenada with her pomelo tree – and what isn’t seen of their lives is imagined by our narrator. This is a lyrical meditation, a 360-degree sensory delight – but also a narrative hoodwink. You must abandon all assumptions on entering the rest of the novel. (I’m hungry to reveal more, but it’d ruin the intricate plotting of your journey.)

Do take note when Hensher casually mentions that “the world was in this small London street. If you looked closely enough it would all reveal itself.” Because when it does, what’s exposed is an elaborately woven patchwork of loveless marriage, suicide, dementia and a savage, apocalyptic novella that’s perfectly conceived. There’s also a first-hand account of being hospitalised by covid; one so vivid and moving I can only assume it’s Hensher’s own story. Like so many, he experienced the terror of saying to a loved one, “I’ll see you soon,” not knowing it to be true.

What’s slowly exposed is a world where we’re not in control, where the order and routine of Part One cannot prevail. But Hensher refuses to lose hope. The final image has echoes of Noah’s dove returning with an olive branch – the promise of new life, reminding us that, though we may find ourselves at the mercy of floods or pandemics, the enduring truth is that “what is left of you is love.”

We’re familiar with the topical memoir – where a writer examines a particular theme or occurrence of their life – and we’re familiar too with literary criticism. Plaited narrative, where three plots or viewpoints or lines of approach wind in and out of each other, is self-explanatory. Biography and autobiography, well, dur.  What though, do we call a book where topical memoir (life as a writer and as a woman surviving divorce) entwines with literary criticism (of the traditional female reader’s Lady-Writer Pantheon: Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante), and biographical sections, bound with a thematic ribbon of female rebirth after crisis, and named after A Room of One’s Own? I know no term, but given the ever-growing popularity of life-writing, and of expanding the ways in which we can look at our own knowledge, no doubt one will emerge. Though – can any portmanteau be big enough?

As most women know, putting emotion and intellectual activity on the same page will always be a challenge to some corners of the culture (or the pub). It’s great to see that confronted. There’s an age-old abyss between the traditional “this is men’s work” of patriarchal writing, and the declaration that “we are human, we have emotions and we’re fed up with them being denied, sidelined or defined as incompatible” which underlies much of the female writing Joanna Biggs loves and champions.

She crisscrosses this territory informatively, passionately and honestly. Formerly a writer and editor at The London Review of Books, now at Harpers in the US, educated at Oxford and the Sorbonne she is, we are told, “one of our sharpest critics”. Also, French phrases are not translated. Ergo, this is a serious book about literature, guys. And the very point of it is to connect the works to the writers’ lives, to the depressions and triumphs, the crying in the bath and the walking into the river. As de Beauvoir herself wrote: “Even if she speaks of general themes, the woman writer will still speak of herself: one cannot read such and such theatre reviews even, without being informed of the size and corpulence of their author, the colour of her hair and peculiarities of her personality.” And indeed we can’t. Biggs is writing a memoir here after all.

By default, this is the kind of ambitious project that looks mighty enticing on paper, is difficult to pull off, and of which reviewers will say: it would have been better if she’d concentrated on the personal / left out the personal; lost / increased the distracting/ fascinating criticism sections; had more / less about the essential / obvious lives of the authors. The kind of unhelpful comments to which the author can only reply in exasperation: “Thank you, but that was not the book I was writing.”

In fact Biggs pulls her vast pile of information, opinion, analysis and feeling together well, and in a way that will speak to her audience – which I hope will go beyond other women both concerned with their own creativity and of an age not to sigh when the experiences of 35-year-olds are presented as “lifelong’”. A new invitation to revisit these writers is always a good thing, and we may indeed see an oncoming wave of – shall we call them autofemlitcritbiogs? perhaps not – which could have titles like “Me and Toni”; “What Zora Did For Me” or “Virginia: Her Part in My Downfall”. And perhaps we all need reminding that it’s not a great idea to engrave a Plath quote on a wedding ring.

Finally, Biggs refers consistently to “Beauvoir”. It’s “De Beauvoir”, surely? I tripped over it every time. Asking around, 95 per cent of those I asked said de B, but according to some very insistent and knowledgeable pedants we’re all wrong.