Set in contemporary Oxford, A Lesson in Cruelty, Harriet Tyce’s fourth novel, is a darkly engaging psychological thriller. It follows three women – Anna, Lucy and Marie – each of whom is connected in some way with charismatic academic criminologist Edgar and his second wife, Rachel. Edgar’s first wife was murdered by her husband’s obsessed student ten years before the novel’s opening. The rediscovery of the murderer’s notebook – excerpts of which punctuate the three women’s narratives in unsettling ways – triggers a chain of events that endanger not only Edgar, but everyone close to him.

The novel opens in prison, where former lawyer Anna is coming to the end of a three-year sentence, following her conviction for a drink-driving incident in which her nephew sustained life-changing injuries. Rejected by her family and tormented by guilt, she intends to kill herself after her release. However, her plans are deferred when, on Anna’s last night in prison, her cellmate kills herself. Overhearing the woman’s last desperate phone call about her missing child, Anna decides to investigate. Her enquiries take her to a hostel where Rachel volunteers, leading to an invitation to the home she shares with Edgar, where Anna becomes increasingly drawn into the central plot. It is only at the novel’s very end that the mystery of the missing child and her connection with the main narrative is resolved, although the attentive reader may have picked up carefully placed clues.

The second narrative strand concerns Lucy, a Criminology masters student. Traumatised by the death of her mother in prison – women in the criminal justice system is one of the novel’s wider interests – she is obsessed with Edgar and has come to Oxford to study under him. Although married to Rachel, Edgar manipulates the infatuated Lucy, sleeping with her at an academic conference and tangling her in his complex personal history.

The third plotline involves two women living under surveillance on a remote Scottish island. Their activities are monitored and controlled via CCTV by a calculatedly capricious, faceless authority. The younger of the two, Marie, is the former student convicted of murdering Edgar’s first wife; the other is a notorious child murderer. The tension builds when Marie escapes the island, intent on making her way back to Edgar in Oxford. Following an unexpected revelation about him, Lucy, Anna and Rachel are drawn together in fearful alliance to intercept Marie.

Tyce’s writing is lucid and her plotting, for the most part, taut. Her procedural and psychological insights are no doubt sharpened by her previous career as a criminal barrister. Anna’s guilt and prison experiences are well drawn, and Lucy’s infatuation with Edgar sympathetically explored. The parallels between the three women are sketched with a deft hand, though the Scottish island story is a little unconvincing, with plausibility sacrificed to plot. The novel reads a little like an episode of ITV’s Lewis. Nevertheless, A Lesson in Cruelty is an intelligent novel that, like all good thrillers, shines a light on wider social issues – the abuse of power, the nature of obsession, the relationship between justice and retribution – as well as being a thoroughly gripping and enjoyable read.

Katherine Muskett is a part-time academic, freelance writer and tutor

The Walsh family is Marian Keyes’ greatest creation. Across seven books featuring the five sisters, their parents Mammy and Daddy Walsh, and their various partners and children, she has created a state of the nations saga, taking in Ireland, the UK, and the US. The latest, My Favourite Mistake, could be pegged as Keyes’ Covid novel but she manages to fit so much more into a genre that the unwise, unkind, and uninformed dismissed as “chick lit”.

Keyes writes funny books that lure you in with jokes then floor you with a one-two punch of melodrama and tragedy. Anna, the Walsh sister at the heart of My Favourite Mistake, was previously the protagonist in 2006’s Anybody Out There, when her life in New York was shattered by the death of her husband and the realisation – slowed somewhat by encounters with a series of charlatan psychics – that his legacy was somewhat complicated.

Eighteen years on from her last starring role, the pandemic provokes Anna to blow up her life in New York – dumping her frustratingly delightful boyfriend and ditching her high-powered beauty PR job – to return to Dublin. This provokes hilarious derision from her sisters…

“Oh, the old ‘pandemic re-evaluation’.” Claire was caustic. “It’s not real, just horsewallop that people say to sound superior.”

… and provides ample opportunities for comic confusion from Mammy Walsh, a reliable fount of malapropisms:

“What’s pivoting?” Mum shifted anxiously. “It sounds like getting something pointy shoved up your bum-hole.”

It’s to Keyes’ credit that she’s as happy to make a silly bum joke as she is to offer subtle observations about society or scathing examples of doctors ignoring women’s health concerns. The woman has range and is keen to show it in this long book.
In search of a job, Anna is dispatched to do PR troubleshooting for forthcoming “a super-high-end coastal retreat” so hated by the locals that it’s provoked threats and violence. Inevitably, the job is complicated by the reappearance of old friends and old loves.

Boiled down to that, the plot fits the Hallmark movie blueprint: Woman leaves big city job and returns to small town concerns where romance and hijinks ensue. But the framework is less important than Keyes’ ear for dialogue, eye for detail, and understanding of the layered lore of family relationships.

Keyes lands a difficult trick. If you’ve read any of the other Walsh family books, knowing the other sisters’ stories makes their supporting roles richer. If you haven’t, My Favourite Mistake works well as a stand-alone book. Anna’s previous story – which filled an entire novel – is recapped in a single sentence (“The great love of my life, Aidan, was killed in a car accident; we’d only been married for ten months.”)

John Peel’s famous description of the post-punk band The Fall – “They are always different; they are always the same.” – could equally apply to Keyes novels. She knows how to do it and to do it well. If you like the old tunes, you’ll enjoy this arrangement.

When we meet Solomon Shereshevsky, the subject of renowned Soviet psychologist AR Luria’s 1968 monograph The Mind of a Mnemonist, we encounter a singularly odd individual. Shereshevsky is “rather ponderous and at times timid”, with a prodigious, seemingly limitless memory. He can not only remember every one of the immense lists of random words Luria has tested him on over the decades, but also where the two of them sat on each occasion, and even what Luria was wearing.

Shereshevsky makes a reappearance in Charan Ranganath’s Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How it Shapes Us. The details of the story are all there – the feats of memory, the extraordinarily vivid imagination, even the man’s tragic end – but the beauty of Luria’s writing, its grace, its sensitivity and soul, is not. While Luria’s language has a spare Russian elegance, direct and poetic, Ranganath reels us in with slick Californian cool. In the excitement of Snoop Dogg and Star Wars references, the sense of being in the room is rather lost.

Ironically, Ranganath’s greatest strength as an author is that he has been in the room. His glittering career in neuropsychology and neuroscience has seen him training in top labs in the USA and heading up a world-leading team of memory researchers at the University of California, Davis. He reminds us of this in not-so-subtle ways, referring to Nobel-prize winning economist Daniel Kahnemann as “Danny” and dropping in, apropos of nothing, that superstar neuroscientist Earl Miller at MIT plays in his punk rock band. Such indulgences can be forgiven in a man whose work has significantly advanced the scientific understanding of how the brain encodes memories.

Ranganath is at his best when describing his own research. For example, amidst the chaos of a major scientific conference, he makes a “beer bet” with a friend about the brain mechanisms underlying “the sense of familiarity”, the sensation we experience when we feel we know something, but can’t put our finger on it. Ranganath argues that a weak feeling of familiarity just means your memory for that thing is weak; his colleague argues that the feeling of familiarity and the strength of a memory are two different processes. To find out who’s right, Ranganath takes us into after-hours experimental sessions at one of California’s first brain imaging laboratories, from the experimental setup and its vagaries (including when the test subjects got bathroom breaks), to the surprising and delightful conclusion that he himself is wrong. It is a vivid depiction of what real science is like in all its unglamourous, backbreaking, ad hoc and occasionally extremely exciting moments.

Perhaps Ranganath’s most significant scientific contributions have come in elucidating the mechanisms of what he calls “imaginative reconstruction”, the idea that remembering isn’t like playing back a tape recording but more like reenacting a play. In the book’s final section he explores how this might impact our mental lives, introducing us to charlatans and frauds, innocent people convinced they have committed murder and faux saviours rescuing victims of faux satanic cults. This delightful whirlwind of stories leaves the reader with the vertiginous sense that reality itself might depend on our ability to imagine it. It’s a privilege to explore these mysteries in such learned and lively company.

In 1963, a young band from Liverpool helped change the face of popular music. No, not the Beatles, though having released their debut album Please Please Me the Fab Four were doing very well, thank you. Merseyside’s The Liverbirds were a teenage four-piece who, like the Beatles, were in thrall to Chuck Berry and honed their craft at the Cavern Club and Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. They also had the distinction of being the first all-girl rock‘n’roll band. When the Cavern’s compere Bob Wooler took them backstage after a Beatles concert and introduced them to the band, John Lennon said: “Girls can’t play guitars.” They decided to take this not as an insult but a challenge.

In the charming, evocative, The Liverbirds: Our Story of Life in Britain’s First Female Rock‘n’Roll Band, the two surviving members, bassist Mary McGlory, 78, and drummer Sylvia Saunders, 77, tell of their rise as ballsy teenage trailblazers, along with departed members Pamela Birch and Valerie Gell, in a male-dominated rock‘n’roll scene. While solo female artists were plentiful at the time, there were no role models for women wanting to play in bands.

Things moved fast for The Liverbirds. Following an underwhelming debut in a church in front of an audience of pensioners, they devoted themselves to practising daily. Championed by Wooler, they soon landed a series of gigs at the Cavern, auditioned for the Kinks manager, Larry Page, and opened for the Rolling Stones in Nuneaton, during which Jagger and co were pelted with cream buns. The Liverbirds even sparked a moral panic when a seemingly pleasant interview with a tabloid newspaper ran with a photo of them looking downcast, with the headline “Mothers, Don’t Let This Happen To Your Girls”.

When they got an offer of a residency at Hamburg’s Star-Club, they jumped at the chance. Their six-week stint turned to four years, during which they toured Europe, released two albums, hung with Hendrix and opened for Chuck Berry (his manager asked them to support the singer for his Las Vegas shows on the proviso they play topless. They told him where to shove it).

Their memoir is written with journalist and author Lucy O’Brien, who presents their story not just as a musical journey but a tale of female adventure, camaraderie – “being an all-girl band meant safety in numbers,” McGlory notes – and sexual freedom. Our two authors vowed to remain virgins before their move to Hamburg, though their resolve crumbled when faced with a parade of handsome musicians. Their memories are warm, detailed and alive, capturing a moment in time when youth culture was flourishing and the Sixties were starting to swing.

The Liverbirds called it a day in 1968: McGlory became pregnant and was warned off drumming by her doctor, while Birch’s husband had a car accident that left him needing round-the-clock care. The past five years has seen a surge of interest in the band – in 2019 there was a musical and there’s now a feature film in the works. It’s not hard to see why. Theirs is a magnificent story of four fearless young women shaking off the post-war gloom, sticking two fingers up at the doubters and noisily making their mark.

With his seventh novel the Scottish author Andrew O’Hagan has produced a story that flickers with the light of our age, in this case London after lockdown, and the world of those at the top of the food chain.

Caledonian Road is a skewering of the London intelligentsia, told through the entanglement of a teacher and his student. Campbell Flynn is a blushing art historian who finds himself unfulfilled by his newly-solidified fame. A familiar type in British life, he’s an aesthete who moves in big circles, a certain pet clever-clogs for those jolly summer parties where the chattering classes get to know one another. He’s an empty-nester in every sense when things begin: wife in the country house, daughter on the catwalk, son in the jet set. Flynn wafts through life amid a hailstorm of kissed cheeks and genuflection; everyone steps out to reassure him of his talents, from his gushing agent over lunch at The Wolseley, to his steely, Starmery sister, with whom he shares both the guilt and the pride of having escaped working-class suburban Glasgow (the city where O’Hagan grew up).

Milo Mangasha is Ariel to Flynn’s Prospero. Born and raised on the Caledonian Road, he’s in the midst of that first great hot streak in life, when you burn with political indignation and feel so charged with possibility that your hands start to tingle. Young, radical, unbound by class loyalties and liberal guilt, Mangasha beguiles Flynn, and the feeling is mutual. They clash for sport, relishing one another’s points of contrast while aiming – hoping – to establish what their common ground looks like. This novel, in the shortest terms, is the story of their way out.

The breadth of O’Hagan’s London is a genuine marvel. From the “ghost village” that is UCL’s English department and the “old-fashioned bone marrow and quails eggs” of the restaurant St John, the author moves artfully through the capital’s centres of power, where his characters thrive. He cuts together his sketches with fine, pointed details that denude the people and places he’s satirising: take Flynn, swaggering back to his house alone and asking Alexa, “play Miles Davis”, only to skip the track in a fright when it doesn’t play one of the famous ones. You can feel O’Hagan revelling in the illicit thrill of accuracy – this is his world, too, and it thrums with scandalous little details, making Flynn something of a stand-in for the author’s own introspection.

The novel progresses with the vivid, sequential rhythm of Balzac, laying out the tableau and our colourful cast of characters: the crooks, the sycophants, the distant wives, the wandering men, all weaving in and out of each other’s lives and pockets. They bristle alongside one another, exposing each other’s flaws, kindling the fire that brings everything down in flames by the journey’s end. By the time you get there, you’ll realise two things: Caledonian Road is both a portrait of the ruling class, and an argument for its dismantling.