Mimi's Ghost by Tim Parks (Minerva, £6.99)

Tim Parks has approached fiction via the academic route, being the translator of - among others - Italo Calvino and Roberto Calasso.

Normally this would be a health warning of sorts, but Mimi's Ghost is mercifully free of the paralysing self-awareness which is so often the hallmark of the academic-turned-novelist. It is a serial thriller set in the suburbs of Verona. The plot wends and twists an erratic path in the footsteps of its handsome hero, an upwardly mobile Englishman called Morris whose efforts to integrate himself into the higher echelons of Italian culture, society and the wine business lead him to commit wholesale slaughter. The hallmark of Parks's style is a wit so acerbic you find yourself surreptitiously checking your fingers from time to time to make sure you haven't cut them on his razor-sharp pages; but his gift for creating dementedly lovable characters, and his skill in manipulating the resultant mayhem, make Mimi's Ghost a joy to read.