This week's books, part 1

    There is a gremlin making mischief in Typepad at the moment which means that I can't add any books to the sidebar lists, so here, 'manually', are some of the latest arrivals.

    Six books by Diana Souhami are at the top of the pile, and of them it's Gluck: Her Biography, on the artist Hannah Gluckstein, which I shall probably pick up first.

    The Uninvited by Liz Jensen comes next: "part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare", this book "engages deep emotions to spine-chilling (and suspenseful effect", says Lawrence Norfolk.

    Manu Joseph's The Illicit Happiness of Other People is a darkly comic story set in Madras in the 1990s involving "an adolescent cartoonist's dangerous interpretation of absolute truth, an inner circle of talented schizophrenics and the pure love of a twelve-year-old boy for a beautiful girl."

    Winner of The Terry Pratchett Prize, David Logan's Half-Sick Of Shadows is "a comical tragedy, a tale of childhood wonder (and despair), of familial dysfunction, of poetry, of the imagination and theoretical physics ... and more besides."

    Then comes Every Promise by Andrea Bajani, translated from the Italian by Alistair McEwen, "a brave and honest novel about what it means to be a man in the modern world; [the author's] imagery is wonderfully, uniquely imaginative, and his open approach to male vulnerability both moving and refreshing."

    More in part 2.