Cat Women
Alice Maddicott

September, pp144, £12.99

This whimsical project is so satisfyingly of a piece with its subject, it’s easy to overlook a certain lack of polish. Few creatures, the author notes, have the power to define you as cats do – if, that is, you’re a woman. It’s different for men: Ernest Hemingway got away with having a houseful of them. “Cat Lady”, conversely, is an identity, “the epitome of sad and lonely female failure”. Maddicott only partially explores the roots of these negative associations, nodding to pagan deities and magical familiars while devoting the bulk of her book to “orphan” images of cats and their female owners, vintage photographs found in junk shops and online auction sites. From the spectral to the plain kitsch, each prompts a fanciful meditation on the forms that this unique bond takes.

Saving Missy
Beth Morrey

HarperCollins, pp384, £12.99

Millicent Carmichael may be 79 years old but this cosy debut novel is a bildungsroman nonetheless. Having never put her Cambridge University degree to use, surrendering instead to motherhood and the careful tending of a scholarly husband, Missy now spends her days in “galactic isolation”, drifting around her cavernous Stoke Newington home in her nightie, knocking back the sherry as she moons over faded photo albums, until a chance encounter offers a path to happiness. Key to her transformation is Bobby, the “mad mongrel” of a mutt she’s pressured into caring for. Morrey signposts her tale’s mysteries a little too obviously, but it builds up an affable momentum as it swings between hope and melancholy, and a smattering of ancient Greek adds character.

Where the Hornbeam Grows
Beth Lynch

Weidenfeld, pp288, £8.99

When Beth Lynch’s husband was offered a job in Switzerland, the time seemed right for a fresh adventure: she’d just left a career as an Eng lit lecturer, they spoke French and German, and there were no children to uproot. Unfortunately, they found their host country chilly and rule-obsessed. Lonesome and “living a stranger’s life”, Lynch sets about recreating her most essential experience of home: the garden her parents made in Sussex. Planting anemones, aquilegias and hellebore, sedums and rudbeckia, she slowly transforms the grounds of their cottage in the dark-wooded hills of the Jura. Fusing memoir with travelogue and horticulture, this enchanting paean to green-fingered solace touches on topics from globalisation to inheritance, eschewing the indulgent excesses of nature writing in favour of a crisp lyricism and frequent bursts of drollery.

• To order Cat Women, Saving Missy or Where the Hornbeam Grows, go to guardianbookshop. com. Free UK p&p over £15