Dancing Backwards Salley Vickers (Fourth Estate, £7.99) Vickers has chosen to set her latest novel on a cruise ship, where her heroine, a middle-aged widow called Vi, takes up ballroom dancing with her dashing room steward. A setting that in other hands could herald a crude holiday romance story becomes, with the help of a writer who was once a psychoanalyst, the arena for a cast of characters whose behaviour is patterned by their history. Like Vi, we are forced to endure the boring conversation of a comic cast of fellow passengers during her six-week transatlantic voyage, with the almost farcical interaction this involves. We gradually learn that she is travelling to America to meet an old friend, and she has conveniently packed her old notebooks to read. The story carries us along at a the stately pace of an ocean liner, so that by the end we have forgotten how unlikely the whole thing is. The author will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 21.

Shadow Child Libby Purves (Hodder, £7.99) Libby Purves, a former Radio Oxford star who moved to Radio 4, lost her son a few years ago, and her experience informs her latest novel. Marion and Tom’s grief for their dead son is disturbed when an angry ‘hippie woman’ turns up on their doorstop, looking for him. Tom just wants to forget, but Marion sets off in search of their lost son’s life and friends. It’s a heart-warming story about modern family life. Libby Purves will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on March 27.