Notes From an Exhibition

Patrick Gale (Harper Perennial, £7.99)

The central figure in this family saga with a gay touch is bipolar (manic-depressive) artist Rachel Kelly, who has just died of a heart attack in her Cornish loft-studio. Each chapter is headed by notes from a posthumous retrospective of Rachel's work. We follow her meeting in Oxford with gentle, patient Quaker husband Antony Middleton, who rescued her when she was pregnant and suicidal. He learned never to ask about her family, whom he never met in more than 30 years of marriage. The story unravels gradually, told from the point of view of each of her four children, including gay Hedley and youngest son Petroc, whose death in a road accident at the age of 15 has marked the family almost as deeply as the experience of their wild, unpredictable mother - sometimes loving, sometimes viciously unkind.

The Amnesiac Sam Taylor (Faber, £7.99)

At the beginning of this weird story, James Purdew, is living an ordinary life in Amsterdam with his Dutch girlfriend, but why can't he remember three years when he was a student at an unnamed university town (which seems to be Hull)? What is in the sealed black box under his bed? James embarks on a nightmare journey into his past, becoming obsessed with a 19th-century manuscript entitled Confessions of a Killer. I confess I was still mystified by the end.

Family Romance John Lanchester (Faber, £8.99)

This straightforward account of Lanchester's family history could be subtitled Lies and Whispers. Although he is a novelist, he presents the story factually, contrasting it with the version he learned as a child. Highly recommended to all those who believe theirs is the only family where a seemingly neutral question can be underlayered with a history of rage and emotional violence.