In a London still scarred and impoverished by World War II, only the gangsters, slum landlords and their hired thugs, preying on an exhausted population, appear to be flourishing. Rationing is still in force and decent housing in short supply. This is no land fit for heroes. Dominic Nolan’s White City takes as its starting point the notorious 1952 Eastcastle Street robbery, in which £278,000 cash was stolen from a Post Office van (at the time the biggest heist in British history, until it was surpassed by the Great Train Robbery), a crime that remains unsolved. Set largely in and around post-war Notting Hill – then a far cry from today’s gentrified neighbourhood – the novel traces the imagined experiences of two fictional families whose fathers disappear in the robbery’s aftermath, against a backdrop of deprivation and increasing racial tension.

Addie, the dual-heritage daughter of Jamaican postman Reggie Rowe and Stevie, an alcoholic former nightclub hostess, looks after her mother and younger sister in their increasingly squalid rented rooms, while searching London for her missing father. While the resourceful and intelligent Addie attempts to discover her father’s whereabouts, Claire, the wife of another missing man, former butcher and small-time criminal Fred Martin, strives to hold her home and family together, and keep Ray, her increasingly wayward teenage son, on the straight and narrow. Trying to evade the clutches of a man called Teddy “Mother” Nunn, the sociopathic deputy in Billy Hill’s criminal empire, Claire dreams of a better life away from the malign influence of spivs, gangsters and their casual violence.

Dave Lander, both violent gang enforcer and undercover policeman – whose true loyalties are never entirely clear, even to himself – provides the novel’s third narrative strand. Lander is an ambiguous figure, whose feelings for Claire lead eventually to tragedy for Addie. His vulnerability and humanity sit uneasily alongside an unsettling capacity for violence, and the way such complex contradictions coherently co-exist in the novel is a mark of the assuredness of Nolan’s writing.

White City moves deftly between these multiple perspectives, highlighting the web of criminality and poverty in which both the innocent and the guilty are caught. Mother Nunn squats malevolently at the centre of that web, a superb literary creation whose sobriquet gestures to his role as self-appointed Mother Superior to a criminal fraternity, in which violence is his higher calling. Symbolically, Mother is also a corporeal manifestation of the city’s pulsing, amoral and violent energies.

The precision, beauty and clarity of Nolan’s writing is remarkable. The deprivation and weariness of post-war London, in which the continuing struggle to survive trumps other moral imperatives, is exquisitely delineated. But the criminal underworld is never romanticised or aestheticised. And for all its terrible bleakness, White City is not a depressing read. Addie’s spirit and tenacity in the face of tragedy, and her determination to find her lost father in Notting Hill’s embattled black community, is both a testament to the strength of the human spirit and a tentative glimmer of a more hopeful future.

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

This could be a review of four books: a cosy crime story that mimics and betters the kind of product pumped out by Richard Osman; a slice of dark academia in the heritage of The Secret History; a parody of autofiction; and the satirical wrapper that Jonathan Coe encloses them all within. The Proof Of My Innocence is a cleverly constructed book that feels like a puzzle Coe challenged himself to complete. It opens with a detective closing in on a suspect on a train and being irritated by railway companies’ ubiquitous “see it, say it, sorted” public announcement. Coe replicates the same feeling of frustration in the reader by repeating the message through the text, before you realise that See It, Say It and Sorted are the titles of the book’s three main sections.

On top of that literary playfulness, The Proof Of My Innocence is another of Coe’s state-of-the-nation novels, or perhaps a “look at what a state the nation got into” novel, since this one takes place entirely during Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership. The murder at the heart of the book occurs at a gathering held by a fictional right-wing think-tank, where the arrival of Truss in No 10 is received with unrestrained glee. The setting gives Coe lots of opportunities to mock the right’s most leaden rhetoric:
“The National Trust was woke. The Ramblers’ Association was woke. The RSPCA, the RSPB and the NSPCC were woke. Channel 4 was woke. Radio 4 was woke. Radio 3 was woke. Every national treasure you could think of, from Richard Attenborough to Judi Dench, from Maggie Smith to Stephen Fry was woke, woke, woke and woke. Prince Charles was as woke as they came. Prince Harry was woker than they came. Meghan Markle’s wokeness was simply off the scale. Biden was woke. The Democrats were woke. Hollywood was woke. Bollywood was woke…”

Despite the recency of the events that Coe has in his sights, the satire feels sharp and fresh, combined with a taste for pleasingly silly jokes (a character hears the news of Truss’s installation as prime minister while stopping for a drink at “a well-preserved seventeenth-century inn which still bore its original name: the Fresh Lettuce”).

One of the joys of the book is how smoothly Coe shifts through various literary styles and weaves the plot through them. In the hands of a lesser writer it would be an utter mess, but he manages to stay true to each narrative voice while propelling the book forward. His detective, Prudence Freeborne, the cheerful, good-food-loving investigator who’s heading to her retirement party when she’s diverted to investigate the murder, could easily sit at the centre of a whole series of whodunnits. Similarly, Phyl, the recent graduate working at an airport branch of a sushi restaurant, who also ends up investigating the case, comes alive through her fizzing frustration with her parents and taste for comfort-watching Friends.

I’ve avoided saying more about the plot here because to do so would be a bit like explaining the punchline of a joke or revealing how a magic trick is done. While Coe’s satirical intent and formal inventiveness are the most obvious takeaways from this novel, he also delivers several satisfying twists and a compelling conclusion to the murder mystery. He told The Guardian that writing detective fiction is “very challenging because you can’t let yourself off the hook. The plot can’t dissolve into meaningful ambiguity, there has to be a resolution.” This book delivers that resolution but still leaves the reader with plenty to ponder.

Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” kept coming to mind as I read Exit Wounds, in particular its poignant repeated line “The art of losing isn’t hard to master”. Peter Godwin’s third memoir deals with grievous losses on several fronts: crucially, that of his mother, the redoubtable doctor figure of his first book, Mukiwa. Having left Zimbabwe (still Rhodesia in the earlier memoir), the elderly Helen Godwin takes to her bed in London. Gradually withdrawing from an unfamiliar modern world, she retains, however, an iron grip on her two remaining children, Peter and Georgina. Aged 90, she has begun to speak in an unfamiliar cut-glass accent, leading them to refer to her as Her Grace. “Even the Queen has brought it down a notch,” her son objects. This speech anomaly is the first of many mysteries he must tackle as he takes stock of her past and his own.

The primary care of Her Grace is left to Georgina, as Peter, a journalist, lives in America with his high-flying wife and young sons. The title of the book harks back to a “hostile environments” course he attended as a BBC war correspondent. With ghoulish glee, the instructor, a combat surgeon, showed photographs of an insignificant entry wound in the belly and the gaping hole gouged in the back, announcing: “It’s the exit wound that kills you.”

Godwin habitually thinks in such metaphors. As a former “white boy in Africa” – the subtitle of Mukiwa – the question of identity and belonging looms large, particularly after the revelation of his father’s Jewish ancestry. Godwin senior reinvented himself so thoroughly as a businessman in Africa that his son had no idea he had relatives who died in the Holocaust. He remembers reading a Hans Christian Andersen story “The Storks” when young, which avers that all storks are called Peter, after a child who refuses to torment a nest of chicks. “I thought that I might be like a stork, a stork named Peter … when I was a young man, I too would migrate north like the white storks. And like them, I would keep returning. Until such time as I could no longer tell which hemisphere was home.”

The big difference, adult Peter notes, is that “I was not part of a flock”. Father and older sister are dead, mother is on the way out. As for his marriage, the entry wound is negligible, a faint unhappiness, barely noticed until it tears and tumbles its way through, wrecking the relationship. The plight of his boys as the divorce progresses returns him to his own childhood, sent away to boarding school aged six by busy parents. “Parent the child you have, not the child you were,” is a therapist’s wise advice.

With its intimate domestic focus, Exit Wounds exhibits some of the queasiness of memoir, filled with revelations from a stranger that would feel awkward from anyone but a close friend. Yet for all the distress, this is a measured and graceful account, one that revels in the power of language and the solace of thought. Godwin loves arcane words – lalochezia, limerance, latibulating – and gorgeous phrases. He and Georgina enjoy puns and wordplay (rhododendrons become zimdodendrons, Mugabe having banned references to the colonial-era name). Alone and tasting the sadness of evenings in New York, he recalls its label – hesperian melancholy – and Dorothy Parker’s dictum: “As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you’ll make it through the night.”

Bishop’s stoic villanelle advises the reader to “practise losing farther, losing faster … though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Peter Godwin has written it, most movingly.

Deborah Levy learned the value of freedom at the age of five, when her father became a political prisoner in South Africa in the 1960s. She almost lost her voice for a while, speaking so quietly as to be inaudible. Later, after he was released and the family moved to England, Levy learned to speak up through her writing, with a distinctive, original and daring voice. This led to recognition as a poet and dramatist, performed by the RSC, in her early twenties and decades later she became a thrice-Booker-shortlisted novelist for Swimming Home (2012), Hot Milk (2016) and The Man Who Saw Everything (2019). Now in her sixties, Levy has lost none of her boundary-breaking interrogation of life. She’s a writer who can casually bring together sex, books, psychoanalysis and shoes in one paragraph, so that – if such interests resonate for you – her books become lifelines of intelligent adventure and amusement on your bookshelf. In her new book of essays, The Position of Spoons, Levy writes about the free-spirited writers and artists whose works have sustained her. Each one, from Marguerite Duras to Paula Rego, characterised by their refusal to live according to the rules.

“No one will give you freedom / You have to take it,” commands Levy in the chapter “X = Freedom”, written in the form of a poem she dedicates to the Surrealist Meret Oppenheim (creator of the suggestive 1936 sculpture of a furry cup, saucer and spoon). Levy extols women artists who, like her, have thrown aside the social expectation to be “nice”. Duras, she writes, was “a reckless thinker, an egomaniac, a bit preposterous really”, but had to be like that to achieve her “incandescent” book The Lover. More than “a forbidden sexual encounter of mind-blowing passion and intensity” this novel “is also an essay on memory, death, desire”, subjects that engage Levy, too; but the nub here is that “Duras never covertly apologises for the moral or psychological way that she exists in the world.”

The essays offer insight into Levy’s influences, enthusiasms and writing process. Though some, like the A-Z lists, didn’t beguile me, the book is a trove of provocative ideas and inimitable one-liners. On fleeing cruel parents to the tune of Marc Bolan’s “Ride a White Swan”, she writes: “Our tears were righteous, our thighs were thin”, an epigram for a generation. Bolan is one of many men included here, including Freud, who refract women’s freedoms in some way. Levy extols JG Ballard’s “noirish female characters” who are “enigmatic instead of domestic, emotionally unavailable, sexually experimental,” with the key virtue that: “they do not want the male lead to marry them and are never about to roast a chicken.”

Yet even the lives measured out in coffee spoons are liberated by Levy: “Here on the rooftop café in Barcelona / Two people are whispering in the corner /To have sex is like killing someone, they agree /Do they mean physically / Philosophically/ Or is it existential murder?/ I want to know”. Me too.