Oreo
Fran Ross
Picador Classics, £8.99, pp260

A picaresque novel based on the myth of Theseus, Oreo was published in the US in 1974, at the height of the black power movement, with the ancient Greek hero replaced by a biracial woman. Now published in Britain for the first time, decades after Ross’s death in 1985, its satire on racial identity reads like a story for our times. “Oreo’” is Christine, the daughter of a black mother who leaves home in search of her estranged Jewish father. “Christine is a black woman on a mission to find her whiteness,” writes Marlon James in his introduction. His glittering endorsement comes with high praise from Paul Beatty and Paul Auster too, and the book lives up to the hype. Could Oreo be this year’s Stoner?

Heart Berries: A Memoir
Terese Marie Mailhot
Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp144

Terese Marie Mailhot’s soul-baring memoir opens as a letter addressed to a lover she thinks she has lost. Suicidal and despairing, she checks herself into a clinic and is diagnosed as bipolar with post-traumatic stress and an eating disorder. Heart Berries takes us from this low point to Mailhot’s return to the world in which she continues her search for love, contends with her demons, and attempts to reconcile herself to the death of her mother, the murder of her artist (and drunkard) father, childhood abuse, and the deep-rooted displacement that comes from being a young Native Canadian woman. Her insights around identity and mental health are particularly thought-provoking (“I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another”). A debut that showcases a gifted writer with a distinct literary sensibility.

Disobedience
Naomi Alderman
Penguin, £8.99, pp288

“It’s difficult to work out the meaning of life in Hendon,” writes Ronit, a worldly 32-year-old who has just returned from her adoptive home in New York to north London, where she grew up. Here, she faces what she thought she had left behind – Orthodox Judaism, the spectre of her rabbi father who has just died and her one-time friend and lover Esti, who is now married. Alderman set the literary world alight in 2006 with this fearless debut novel novel about faith, sexuality and life choices, winning awards along the way. Republished to coincide with a forthcoming film adaptation starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, it has lost none of its fierce, eloquent intelligence.

To order Oreo for £8.49, Heart Berries for £11.04, or Disobedience for £7.64, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99