When Vladimir Balakin, second-in-command of FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, covertly enters the UK a week before a G7 conference is scheduled to take place in Edinburgh, British intelligence services are alarmed. Emma Makepeace, former Army intelligence officer and operative with the shadowy Agency – an organisation set up to hunt Russian spies – is despatched to Edinburgh to uncover Balakin’s plans and investigate his connection with Nick Orlov, an apparently respectable Russian businessman living in the city. It soon becomes a race against time to identify and thwart a Russian plot to bring terror to the G7 meeting and humiliate Britain for its support for Ukraine.

Disguised as Anna Case, a glamorous distribution company exec, Emma goes undercover to get close to Orlov. Faced with acting as a honey trap, she questions what she’s prepared to do in the name of national security. But she’s not alone in attempting to unravel the details of the Russian threat because Kate Mackenzie, an outspoken and world-weary Edinburgh police officer, is assigned as her guide to the city. And as the pair close in on the would-be assassin, in an investigation that takes them from the rarefied world of the super-rich to the more modest homes of the criminal underclass, the two women find themselves in mortal danger.

The Trap is Ava Glass’s third spy novel, a fast-paced and propulsive read, with moments of heart-stopping jeopardy. Glass, according to the author’s website, once “worked closely” with real spies, a background that lends insight and authenticity to her writing. Set against a real-world backdrop of the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and the Salisbury Novichok poisonings, the narrative seems all too plausible, even if the action strays into James Bond territory, particularly the section set in Rome. I suspect much covert intelligence activity is rather more mundane than it is portrayed here, but this is not a criticism. Unlike Ian Fleming’s Bond books – which hover on the edge of this work’s consciousness – this is a thoughtful and intelligent novel about the moral complexities of the world in which Makepeace operates. At multiple points in the story, she is forced to make uneasy personal compromises.

The writing is brisk and assured and narrative tension is, for the most part, plausibly maintained: Glass’s authority and confidence with plot and character engage the reader from start to finish. And though the storyline about suspected leaks to the media might have been incorporated a little more smoothly – the subplot feels like a bit of an afterthought, bolted on to ratchet up tension in anticipation of the final confrontation – this is a minor criticism. The respect and increasing affection between Makepeace and Mackenzie (The Trap passes the Bechdel test with flying colours) is particularly well done. It is also refreshing to read an intelligent narrative that does not reveal some aspect of the final outcome in its opening chapter.

The Trap is the third instalment in Glass’s Alias Emma series and can also be read as a standalone work. But this was such a compelling read that I intend to read the first two books – The Chase and The Traitor – before the month is out.

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

Cinderella cuts her stepmother’s head off. Mowgli razes the man village to the ground. Young Wart grows up amid incest, adultery and rape. Sound familiar? Well no, it wouldn’t. Still: that’s what children’s literature looked like before Disney got hold of it.

From Perrault to Philip Pullman, Robert Louis Stevenson to Judy Blume, Sam Leith (Spectator literary editor) guides us through 300 years of almost every writer British schoolkids might have thought part of the canon – the best of them, as the TLS once wrote of JM Barrie, “immortal by election”.

Making a virtue of the blurry, overlapping necessity of what exactly children’s literature is (and/or what it’s for), he maps a fitful progress through phases of bloodthirsty Calvinist moralising, mawkish Victorian child-worship (nauseating little princesses whom “Gandhi himself would be tempted to slap”), and eventually some form of portrayal of children as they actually were (William Brown, Leith notes, was “borderline criminal”), against a background of the societal “creation” of childhood itself, and thence – quite slowly – of a children’s literature per se.

Even then, much of it was still being written rather more at kids than for them. Not until Lewis Caroll, Leith concludes, was “the sheer otherness of a child’s apprehension of the world acknowledged”. Not surprisingly, amid persistently retrofitted ideas of childhood and fluctuating expectations of realism (might you, dear reader, really win that golden ticket?), there were as many solutions to the problem of (not) growing up – paradises lost, arrested and regained – as there were writers in this new-found marketplace. Even without contextual forays into industrialisation, psychology, two world wars and social mobility, between the Imperial Christian muscularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the “shining benignity” of Doctor Dolittle, and the “cheese-dreams” of Moominvalley, The Haunted Wood represents a lot of reading.

Although most of the corpus remains resoundingly white and middle class – “at once mildly subversive and deeply conservative” – many of its now world-famous characters are far less straightforward than is commonly assumed. Loneliness, instability and death loom large in these books, as they did in their lives of many of the authors. A significant number of these writers, too, came deeply to resent their celebrated creations (albeit not half as much as their own offspring). More happily, a few – E Nesbitt and Charles Kingsley among them – have decent claims to have improved the real-world lot of living creatures.

Light-hearted, commonsensical and optimistic, Leith by and large avoids “taking a spade to a soufflé” (though he has forgotten how shit children’s TV was in the ‘80s, I think), and steps adroitly through the minefields de nos jours – race, sexuality, anything at all to do with JK Rowling.

Make no mistake, though: at 500-plus pages, with chapters on Russian folktale scholarship, discussions of theoretical physics, and the occasional footnote on Latin etymology, this is very much a book about children’s literature for adults. (There are, also, rather a lot of spoilers.)

It’s not the personal memoir of reading that I was hoping for, and every reader will have his gripes about what’s not included (Beau Geste? Willard Price? Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang? If Lord of the Rings – crieth the ex-chorister – then why not Lord of the Flies??); but as one might expect from someone with his day job, Leith does indulge in the odd trenchant literary criticism (“Nuts to the Mr Men”), and I was entertained to learn that no less a banterer than Locke suggested children’s learning should be fun(!); that Beatrix Potter boiled her dead pets; and Evgenia Ransome mocked her poor Arthur for his haemorrhoids.

Moreover, as with all good non-fiction books, The Haunted Wood provides a whole new lifetime’s reading list. I’m looking forward to sharing it with my own kid.

A work of historical fiction, The Instrumentalist tells the extraordinary story of Ana Maria della Pietà (c.1696-1782) a child-prodigy violinist and pupil of Antonio Vivaldi. The first chapter is heart-breaking in its description of desperate prostitutes and unmarried women in seventeenth-century Venice, who either drowned their unwanted babies in the canals or deposited them in a scaffeta: a revolving drawer set into the orphanage wall. While trying to drown herself and her baby, Ana Maria’s mother, a sex worker, is brought to her senses by the powerful screams of her daughter and instead deposits her at La Pietà, leaving a token of identification, like a split playing card, in her swaddling clothes, keeping one half for herself.

Vivaldi was the maestro at La Pietà for 30 years, making it the most famous of Venice’s four Scuole Grande when the city was known internationally as “the Republic of Music”. (He later upped sticks and went to Mantua, where, as court chapel master, he composed The Four Seasons).

La Pietà housed a thousand orphans; the boys learned a trade while the girls had music lessons. The most musically promising were auditioned, aged eighteen or younger, for le Figlie di Coro (daughters of the choir), a 60-strong orchestra that had female conductors as well as musicians and under Vivaldi’s tutelage became famous throughout Europe. Rousseau, Casanova and Catherine the Great were among the many dignitaries, aristocrats and Grand Tourers who attended the concerts and made princely donations of ducats.

Such is Ana Maria’s talent that Vivaldi buys her a bespoke violin when she’s only eight years old, made from Alpine spruce by local artisans; she is later accepted into the Figlie di Coro aged just fifteen. Growing up, she is both beautiful and ruthless, secretly composing music for Vivaldi, and abandoning her friends when they fall pregnant or fatally ill. She clings to her violin and ambition with adamantine will and has recurrent nightmares of drowning, recounted ad nauseam. Is she reunited with her mother, and was she a lover of Vivaldi? These are the questions that keep you turning the pages.

This is award-winning journalist and filmmaker Constable’s first novel, which is cinematic in its rapid, staccato scene changes; it could easily be made into a movie with outstanding music. But the dialogue can be thin and while her descriptions are vivid – especially of Ana Maria’s synaesthesia, which means that when she plays notes she sees explosions of colour erupting across the pages – there’s a glut of metaphors, similes, adverbs and adjectives that beg for tighter editorial intervention. Ana Maria cannot just glimpse or glance, she “flicks a look”, her heart cannot beat but has to “slam against her chest” or become “a fist clenching itself round Ana Maria’s heart.” (Do “edges of vision crackle”?) There is a great deal of panting and breathlessness: her “fear fizzes up” and her feelings “burn” with “a want so strong it could surely light a fire”. I tired of the many analogies between music and colour, and longed instead for the cooler timbre of Baroque sacred music, the crystalline notes of pure female voices, cadenzas, stanzas and concerti soaring up to Tiepolo’s frescoed ceilings in the Church of La Pietà. The virtue of the book is in reminding us how much of Vivaldi’s music would not exist were it not for La Pietà’s talented female orphaned students, and the genius virtuoso, Ana Maria.

“The late, great Deborah Orr was dying when she began to talk about her next book… It was to be called Mrs Jekyll.” So states the foreword to the novel that the celebrated journalist was never able to finish, or even to start in earnest. She had told friends the book was writing itself in her head, and there it remained. Cheerio Publishing commissioned Emma Glass to write the story instead, as a posthumous tribute, and what Orr would have made of Glass’s version can only be a matter of conjecture. But the young novelist’s bold rendition of the classic gothic horror tale from Robert Louis Stevenson is worthy of the genre.

The novel’s protagonist, Rosy Winter, is a young teacher diagnosed with cancer. Her husband, friends and work colleagues offer support but must watch helplessly as she deteriorates, and a positive outcome seems increasingly unlikely. Though medical science does its best to offer hope, Rosy must confront the hideous truth that this is terminal.

A chance meeting with a clairvoyant offers a gateway to a mysterious, belligerent presence that invades Rosy’s realm like an alter ego. The sequences describing their encounters are both poetic and visceral, in keeping with the horror genre; the reader is reminded that this is a physical, bodily conflict.

“Tangled in sinew
Tearing
Soaked in saliva
Must have been a gobful
Mouth to mouth
Lips leave feeling full
Looking up from the floor
Black hole is the first thing
I see”

Having felt increasingly disempowered by her illness, Rosy finds an outlet in the brutishness and force of these violent, even vile, confrontations, which somehow help to restore her lost sense of agency. But will the darkness engulf or empower her? We are never quite sure what will prevail or even who we should be rooting for; the reader is placed at the fulcrum. When life turns on itself, what is there left to lose?

Emma Glass attracted considerable acclaim for her first two novels; her 2018 debut Peach was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize while her 2020 follow-on, Rest and Be Thankful, established the children’s nurse as a literary force in the making. The publishers handed Glass a sizeable opportunity in this commission but also a weighty task.

The writing carries itself along at a clip and this is a novel to be read in one sitting. The dialogue is punchy and her language allows readers to sink into what becomes a remarkably immersive story of one woman’s disintegration. Chilling, thrilling.