Being Dead, by Jim Crace (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)

One of the finest English novels of recent years, this languid, intensely imagined Booker runner-up reports on the brutal murder of a middle-aged married couple. These self-contained marine zoologists are an unlikely pair to be found dead, viciously battered, caught making love among the sand dunes. Lucid and unsentimental, the narrative is saved from sensationalism by the harsh, subtle beauty of Crace's stark prose. Always an original, unpredictable writer, he sets the scene with a quasi philosophical meditation on death and goes in search not of the killer, but of the respective personalities of the victims. In merging the language of science with a strange poetry, Crace charts their physical disintegration with minute detail. For all the explicit description, Being Dead never becomes a voyeuristic police thriller. It is instead a thoughtful exploration of opposites: of the natural world versus the dictates and expectations of society, and how the physical process of death carefully dismantles the living.