A Crime in the Neighbourhood by Suzanne Berne (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

Xceptional. Berne's convincing, reflective debut impresses on many levels

Xceptional. Berne's convincing, reflective debut impresses on many levels. The narrator, now in her 30s, candidly recalls the world of her 10-year-old self at the exact moment normality was cast aside forever; when a young boy was raped and murdered mere feet from safety, when her "suburban father burdened with the heart of a Russian hero without any sort of balancing grand intellect or ironic world view" ran away with her aunt, leaving her mother and her other aunts in a state of defiance and when Watergate proved both a national TV distraction and a continuance of the evil begun with Kennedy's killing and Vietnam. At the heart of it all is young Marsha whose belief in everything has been shattered and she selects a scapegoat. Intelligent, honest and quite simply, immensely superior to about 95 per cent of the fiction currently published anywhere.

Read it.

Eileen Battersby

Eileen Battersby

The late Eileen Battersby was the former literary correspondent of The Irish Times