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After co-writing a book that was optioned for a BBC drama, Scott Kershaw’s first solo novel has just been published in paperback, hot on the heels of its launch last year. The writer spent his pre-novel years touring Europe as a music journalist, before relocating to a Victorian cottage in Lincolnshire, near his native Grimsby.

Scott’s peripatetic years seem to have fed into this excellent debut, which has a truly international feel. Five strangers, scattered across the globe and seemingly unconnected, receive a horrifying message from an unknown number. The person they love most in the world has been taken, and the only way to save them is to play the titular Game. To further complicate matters, the players are told they are being watched, must not seek help, and there can be only one winner.

Out of this intriguing premise, Kershaw spins a fast-paced, fascinating tale. Told in alternating chapters, we follow the progress of New Yorker Maggie as she races to save her son; Brett in Minnesota, whose best friend has been taken; Sarah and Linda in England, both desperate to rescue their daughters; and Parisian Noah, whose beautiful fiancée has been abducted. Each of the five players initially tries to wriggle out of their seemingly impossible predicament but then, realising they’ve been outsmarted at every turn by those masterminding the game, sets out to beat the increasingly impossible challenges, and win.

The result is a high-octane tale, which is perplexing and blackly addictive. But what might have descended into a formulaic race-against-time thriller is more than rescued by the fascinating and diverse characters Kershaw has assembled, each with secrets of their own and good reason to be suspicious of the others. The author makes much of the fact that, when they eventually meet, the players are both allies and enemies, each suspicious of the others, yet also aware that collaboration may be the only way out of their predicament. As his players battle to save their loved ones, Kershaw makes room for a psychological depth often lacking in this type of book, encouraging the reader to ruminate on the things we will do for love.

A sort of Squid Game meets Saw mash-up, this is crying out for a Netflix adaptation, though at no point does it feel as if it’s been written with that in mind. It’s very dark in places, and Kershaw does not shy away from mankind’s more violent impulses. Make no mistake, cosy-crime this is most definitely not. But it is a superior thriller, sure to get the adrenaline pumping and guaranteed to keep you intrigued into the early hours. Kershaw is definitely one to watch.

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

Before delving into other people’s perception of truth and lies, you must be prepared to lay bare who and what you believe yourself. Not easy, but Dina Nayeri has pulled it off in this inspiring book – part memoir, part investigation and part confession.

Having been a child refugee herself (from Iran to the US), Nayeri gives horrifying accounts of asylum-seeking victims of rape, torture and persecution whose stories were rejected by Western authorities.

“Today’s asylum officers are instructed to dig out inconsistencies,” she says. “Trained to disbelieve, they demand a perfect performance and accuse survivors of inventing details, of passing off unrelated injuries, even of inflicting scars on themselves. In the UK, a few years ago, a 50-year-old asylum seeker was told that she was too old to be plausibly raped.”

Equally alarming are the wrongful criminal convictions she examines. Nayeri quotes a US lawyer: “We see that police form a theory of the crime based on the first identification and quickly start bucketing information. Anything that fits is believed; anything that doesn’t fit is a lie.”
At McKinsey, where Nayeri trained prior to her Harvard MBA, she learnt: “You can present a genius model full of macros and good data, but if you present it like it’s a guess, it’s worthless.”

Presentation – the way the story is told – can also bury the truth. “Historians might say that Trump didn’t understand truth, that it didn’t exist for him. Maybe so,” she says. “But for an opportunist and a grifter, truth is a feeble match for a good performative. Trump may not have understood the truth, but he understood something more powerful: how to alter it.”

Ranging from the personal, social and political to the spiritual and philosophical, this book is a patchwork endeavour but it holds together as a brilliant whole. Ultimately, it is Nayeri’s forensic examination of her own life, and willingness to expose her own conditioning and interactions with those close to her, that produces the most intense passages. She really does want to get at the truth – and in doing so shows remarkable courage.

Birnam Wood, the third novel by Booker Prize-winner Eleanor Catton, is named after the forest that stepped in and signalled the end for Shakespeare’s Macbeth. While not a retelling in any way it does channel similar themes: evil, power, guilt, and the righteousness of horticulture.

Set in New Zealand in 2017, Birnam Wood tells the story of twenty-somethings Mira, Shelley, and Tony, all part of an activist gardening collective called Birnam Wood, as they become entangled in the machinations of steely American tech billionaire Robert Lemoine. He is CEO of drone manufacturer Autonomo and has quietly purchased a stretch of unprepossessing land from the recently knighted, but down-to-earth, Sir Owen Darvish. In return for well over the asking price and funding for Darvish’s conservation project, all Lemoine asks is that he be left in peace to build his bunker and quietly wait for the apocalypse.

Of course, he has much bigger plans. Soon drones are sighted, people are missing, and the socially conscious men and women of Birnam Wood find themselves doing things they never dreamed of. Catton is a compelling and fluent storyteller who enjoyably ensnares her principals in a worsening web of intrigue. There are aliases, tracker apps, cover-ups, covers blown, and a journalist who just needs to get his photos to the lab so he can “blow it all wide open”.

Catton neatly maps the modern landscape and its ever-widening fissures: contented baby boomers, anxious millennials, environmental exploitation, property ownership, sexual politics. These aspects are sympathetically drawn and subtly satirised: “Tony considered himself to have a healthy respect for women – healthy, that is, because it was not entirely unconditional.” Despite the moral dilemmas and intense introspection (“Mira was a remorseless critic of her own emotions”) there is a sense that the plot is bound for its destination whatever happens. This is mainly due to the disappointing Lemoine, a bland super-villain with an easily explicable motive and a habit of making “catastrophic oversight[s]” whenever the story needs moving along.

Nevertheless, Birnam Wood is a pleasingly compulsive and bracingly bleak read. Its depiction of our individual and collective wrong decisions is humane and persuasive. A timely reminder that our actions have consequences, and that we can no longer bank on there being forests around to save us.

Each story in this collection, which honours the 50th anniversary of the feminist publishing house Virago, is titled by one rude word used of women. According to Sandi Toksvig’s introduction, in it “a chorus of brilliant writers… speak their truth and unleash their rage.” Actually the book is both more and less than that. Far too various to be a chorus, it’s a mixed bag: delightful, thought-provoking, bemusing.

The writers’ rage is not so much unleashed (a relief: uncontrolled rage can be so boring) as honed and slipped out in potent drops. Brilliance certainly shines — from Kamila Shamsie’s Churail, a sneaky, creepy, deep story of daughterly loyalty, diasporal tentacles, and parental love; from Linda Grant’s Harridan, an account of Celeste, former wild-child hippy babe of the ’60s King’s Road, now smoking through lockdown in a scarlet silk kimono in a scrubby north London backyard, and Susie Boyt’s butter-wouldn’t-melt Muckraker, where a woman obsessed with widowers has a terrible twist up her sleeve.

Different genres, albeit the literary end of genre, are represented: Caroline O’Donoghue’s Hussy, a sly, funny trip through the world of pornography; a neat horror story in graphic-novel form from Eleanor Crewes (She-Devil); a kinda sci-fi / kinda AI romance, Vituperator, from Helen Oyeyemi; magical realism from Stella Duffy in Dragon, as our menopausal heroine drops gleaming scales into the lives of victims of patriarchal injustice and female sorrow.

We have accounts of historical injustices from Rachel Seiffert (Fury, Poland, 1942) and Emma Donoghue (Termagant, London, 1916). CN Lester’s Virago indirectly recalls both the gender-pioneer story of Anastasius Linck and Catharina Mühlhahn, an eighteenth-century Prussian couple trying to survive a harsh world, and the psycho-sexual works of Krafft-Ebing. In Wench, Kirsty Logan gives us a love story set in a community of mediaeval girls labelled and tormented by oppressive perverted priests. Chibundu Onuzo’s stirring, surprisingly funny Warrior is the Old Testament judge and prophet Deborah, whose astonishing story is perhaps 32 centuries old — this is one of several of these stories where I wished the author would just write the novel, please.

In her tender, fierce offering, Spitfire, Ali Smith goes off-piste, wondering about who her mother was, before she became her mother – as a Waaf, alongside that kind of Spitfire, and the men who piloted them. And Claire Kohda’s lush Tygress is (spoiler alert) her mother. Literally.

Oh and the first story, Siren, is by Margaret Atwood, on whimsical form. So yes, that’s a yes from me. 

I had hoped Peter Frankopan’s latest book, The Earth Transformed, would keep me occupied on a long-haul flight from New Zealand. But on opening the pdf on my laptop, I realised this hefty beast would require my flying to the moon and back if I was to finish it before touching down in London.

This is not a book to skim, nor a way of nodding off. It’s just too good. My journey over, I remained engrossed until the end. Not least because I was leaving my homeland in the grip of Gabrielle, a cyclone so devastating it had taken lives, destroyed entire regions and shattered vital infrastructure. You know things are bad when government officials stop talking of rebuilding and start promoting “managed retreat” as a national strategy. This is surely a book for our time as we ponder extreme weather and how we can mitigate ever-increasing climate risks.

The Earth Transformed is no prefigurement of doom, nor does it exaggerate – but we are encouraged to challenge our assumptions. It seems the significance of changing weather patterns on global social, political and economic powershifts cannot be overstated. No longer should we view climate as a mere backdrop to human history: it is a lens through which we should view our evolution as a species.

The scale of Frankopan’s ambition is admirable. Just as he tilted us towards the East in his bestselling The Silk Roads, here he reorientates our attention towards “regions, periods and peoples” that have received little attention or investigation in more conventional climate books.

This one starts at The Dawn of Time and takes us up to the present day, but never sags under its own momentum. “Our frame of reference is highly self-centred and laughably narrow,” he chides, pointing out that humans have been present on earth for what amounts to the batting of an eyelid. Shame on us for getting it into such a parlous state.

His analysis is far from gloomy. Anthropogenic impacts aside, solar activity, volcanic eruptions and the planet’s own oscillations have caused climate stress and wrought destruction and extinction on a massive scale. Nature isn’t harmonious or benevolent, yet neither is it motivated by self-interest, like our lot.

Drawing on all sorts of source material, Frankopan presents countless fascinating examples of transformation, collapse, exploitation and adaptation in the plant and animal kingdom as well as within lesser known cultures and states. Lake sediment, tree rings, pollen, fossil records and stalagmite data carry equal weight with shipping registers and land sale records, ancient artefacts and historical writing.

Migration, trade, productivity, the spread of disease, military aggression, urbanisation, domestication of plants and animals, the persecution of minorities, even our cosmological belief systems have been influenced by changing weather conditions. Politically, economically and socially we’re hostages to environmental whimsy, with climatic stress often bringing “ongoing issues to the boil”.

Frankopan’s discussion flows effortlessly, buoyed by novel connections such as how there’d be no Shakespeare or Tolstoy without accountants; how the availability of sugar drove both ecological revolution in India and smuggling in Britain; how sheltering in caves during intense meteorological disturbance made our oxygen-deprived forebears enter altered states of consciousness and gave birth to the first art.

One can only guess at the eyewatering task of marshalling material from such vastly different fields. The project obviously taxed Frankopan over many years… we can only hope for more. There’s nothing so infectious as the curiosity and wonder of a talented author delighting in the details of his research. The vivid manner in which Frankopan shares his insights makes The Earth Transformed a compelling read, even for those reluctant to commit to over 700 pages, or take a rocket to the moon.