Stowaways

By André Aciman

Faber & Faber, £12.99

Julian, a lawyer, answers the summons of an older woman named Carol to mourn the death of Paul who loved them both. Julian and Carol are rarefied beings (Carol once translated Orwell’s 1984 into classical Greek); their conversation – about loss and longing – more eloquent than chit-chat has a right to be. Aciman is a master of emotion dissected by well-dressed, well-read people; the rhythm of his prose is sensuous but the words are plain. Carol observes, “You know you’ve lost someone when you can’t wait to ask them something and all you get when you’re stupid enough to look for them is: We’re sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.” Her bereft state wounds our hearts. Mei Chin

The Connemara Sea-Trout Fisheries

By Paddy Gargan

Coch-y-Bonddu Books, £45

Connemara has 19 sea-trout fisheries, from Spiddal in the south to Delphi in the north. In the early 1980s more than 20,000 sea trout were recorded by anglers on these waters. And then at the end of that decade, stocks collapsed. A government taskforce, headed by Ken Whitaker, blamed sea lice that infested estuaries after the state-aided establishment of net-cage salmon farms. Angler and biologist Paddy Gargan’s beautiful book is at once an introduction to Connemara’s fisheries and an argument for moving open-net salmon farms to land-based operations. It is less an elegy for the breac geal – he offers hope for its recovery even as climate change warms rivers – than a round, unvarnished tale of unintended consequences. Breandán Mac Suibhne

Keshed

By Stu Hennigan

£12.99, Ortac Press

Hennigan’s unflinching fiction debut channels the entire history of British kitchen-sink realism. Sean Molloy, the young anti-hero, escapes miraculously from a life dedicated to “self-annihilation” into one of incipient domestic bliss. Although the novel is set mainly in the noughties, Sean feels the old days are “close enough to touch” as though he had “lived it all himself”. With atavistic inevitability, he slides back into his bad old ways. This is foreshadowed by the experimental white-knuckle opening scene: one of five manic paratactic episodes describing an unfolding tragedy. The switch from third- to second- and even first-person narration is almost imperceptible, leading to a sense of entrapment within the Yorkshire vernacular, whose formidable verve is also the novel’s veritable powerhouse. Heartbreaking yet exhilarating. Andrew Gallix