The Song of the Kings, by Barry Unsworth (Penguin, £7.99)
Unsworth slips behind the scenes of the Iliad to retell his legend of pragmatic politics and dodgy divination. His sombre novel takes place in an anticipatory lull as the Greek forces pray for the winds to change and propel them towards Troy. Agamemnon's authority is crumbling, but he is persuaded that he can secure his position by sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia to Zeus. Smooth-spinning Odysseus helps colleagues persuade themselves of the necessity of killing the 14-year-old girl. Unsworth does not really refresh the standard characterisations, but is alert to shaman voices on the fringes of myth. He gravely nods to the present with generals dismissing "collateral damage" or fretting about their image. Against their sexed-up temporising, he asserts the pure power of story, the imaginative realm where spin holds no sway. But Unsworth also acknowledges that perception is all when rhetoric takes hold - "simplicity, when it was passionate, would always win." DJ
White Powder, Green Light, by James Hawes (Vintage, £6.99)
Perhaps still smarting from the famously bad movie of his novel Rancid Aluminium, Hawes comes kicking at the film world. Jane Feverfew, an isolated academic in Pontypool, feels that she has "put her life down and left it somewhere stupid". She turns her worthy course on a neglected Euro-classic into a horny screenplay by following the simple advice: Make It Obvious. Paul Salmon, a shameless producer who can blush on demand, pounces on the script and scrabbles to get it greenlit. Never forgetting "the innate duplicity of the Hereditary Enemy" (ie the English), Welsh funders put up a promising young director and lots of soft money (in between toasts to JPR Williams). Meanwhile, Jane hits the Groucho, and nostril meets gack in the disabled loos. Hawes certainly has a gob on him, and his motormouth novel dishes out contempt at Welsh-language diehards and Soho ponces alike. But nothing floats his boat more than watching meejah corruption boil and bubble. DJ
The Bat Tattoo, by Russell Hoban (Bloomsbury, £6.99)
Sarah Varley (English antiques dealer) and Roswell Clarke (American model maker) collide in front of a Chinese bowl in the V&A, both searching out a happy red bat scudding over the porcelain. They could use a hopeful mascot - both in their 40s, both widowed, both with unfinished business and a spare tyre of guilt, they narrate alternate chapters of Hoban's lonely, whimsical novel. Sarah responds despite herself to Roswell's "failure pheromones"; he wonders how he has fallen into a career of crafting pornographic crash-test dummies for a European squillionaire. Hoban slowly edges the prickly pair together, and endearingly throws in his fave books and music, plus pretty much everything he enjoyed in London a couple of years back - Caravaggio at the Royal Academy, Verdi at ENO, Aki Kaurismaki's deadpan film noir. In the background, Peggy Lee sings "Is That All There Is?" and Hoban's lonesome seekers puzzle out an answer to stop their lives falling by the wayside. DJ
The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt (Bloomsbury, £7.99)
It would be nice if you could approach this book pretending you didn't know that Tartt struggled for 10 years to produce it in the aftermath of the astoundingly successful The Secret History. It might help too not to know that Bloomsbury forked out a reputed £1m for the rights. Unfortunately, with a fancy double cover that provides space for the praise that doesn't fit on to the back, an author photo that masquerades as a portrait painting and the fact that reading groups can send off for a free six-page guide, you cannot avoid knowing that The Little Friend is an event as much as a read. Naturally, it disappoints. Not so much because the story of how 12-year-old Harriet sets out to find her brother's killer lacks the evident suspense or style of its predecessor, but because Tartt, in fashioning Harriet into an indomitable child heroine, has left out a reason why the reader should care about her or her desire to solve the family mystery. IM
Night Visits, by Ron Butlin (Serpent's Tail, £7.99)
Outwardly, Malcolm is a little boy trying to make sense of his father's unexpected death. So what if he has the occasional obsessive thought or a knack of absenting himself from what's going on around him - his aunt, Fiona, is a little strange and awkward too. Like him she is in emotional pain, and like him she comforts herself with repetitive actions and a schedule of events that must follow their proper sequence so that madness can be averted. Butlin begins by drawing deceptively small parallels between aunt and nephew. Then, as their abusive relationship develops, he shows a pattern of mental cruelty stretching back to Malcolm's grandmother. Though the setting lends itself to gothic overstatement, Butlin's exploration of emotional abuse is shocking without being sensationalist. As Fiona draws the boy away from his mother into her fantasy world, he is careful never to let repugnance for her as perpetrator outweigh sympathy for her as victim. IM
Earth and Ashes, by Atiq Rahimi (Vintage, £5.99)
At little more than 50 large-typeface pages, this grief-filled narrative by an Afghan-born writer and film-maker who now lives in Paris is barely a novella, but, arguably, it would be hard to bear its bitter lamentations for any greater length. Set during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, it is a deceptively simple tale told in three scenes. Dastaguir and his grandson are waiting for a lift to the mine where the boy's father works. A bomb has obliterated their village and deafened the child. As they wait by a roadside stall, its owner consoles the old man and listens to his story. A short interlude with the truck-driver is followed by the old man's deepening grief at what he learns when he reaches the mine. Though in Dastaguir's conversation with the wise and compassionate stall-owner you sense allusions that are obscure to anyone unfamiliar with Afghan literature, Rahimi's brevity serves to amplify the absolute hopelessness of his characters' situation. IM
