Writers & Lovers

Lily King

Picador, £14.99, pp256

Thirty-one-year-old Casey is persevering with her ambition to be a writer, in spite of the obstacles in her way: acute grief for her mother’s death, crippling student loans and a disastrous affair with a married poet. Working part-time in a restaurant, she’s soon embroiled in two new love affairs, while the mystery of her estrangement from her father permeates the novel. The conclusion feels too neat, but it’s nonetheless a wry and perceptive coming-of-age story.

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History

Liam Vaughan

William Collins, £20, pp272

As the hyperbolic title suggests, this story of audacity and bravura triggered a devastating – if brief – collapse of the financial markets in May 2010. Investigative journalist Vaughan weaves a well-researched and fast-paced narrative about the incident and an intriguing portrait of the culprit: not a high-flying trader but a lone wolf working out of his bedroom at his parents’ house in Hounslow, west London.

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

Margaret Drabble

Canongate, £10.99, pp384

The paperback reissue of Drabble’s engrossing 2009 memoir blends family history and reflection with social and cultural history to reveal the novelist’s passion for jigsaws. In her moving and candid foreword, Drabble insists the book isn’t a memoir and recounts her family’s discomfort with the genre. But what follows is an intimate account of Drabble’s experience of depression and her relationship with her aunt Phyl (with whom she used to complete puzzles), alongside a fascinating history of the jigsaw puzzle.

• To order Writers & Lovers, Flash Crash or The Pattern in the Carpet go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15