The Lacuna Barbara Kingsolver (Faber, £7.99) This is a long book for holiday reading, and takes a while to get into, but well worth the effort. The unreliable narrator is Harrison Shepherd, and we first read his diary as a young teenager in Mexico. Neglected by his promiscuous Mexican mother and his cold US father, he emerges from his cocoon when he becomes mesmerised by diving, and by an underwater ‘lacuna’ — a cave in the ocean that seems to open up new worlds. He finds work in the household of Communist artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, complicated by the arrival of exiled Russian revolutionary Lev Trotsky, pursued by Stalin’s assassins. Shepherd’s narrative gradually moves from bland innocence into a world of violent colour, leading us into his roller-coaster struggle to establish an identity as a writer in turbulent times.

The Lazarus Vault Tom Harper (Arrow, £6.99) Oxford history graduate Tom Harper has used the city as a backdrop to the start of his latest thriller. Ellie, an impoverished Oxford research student, is offered a job with a bank in the City of London. She uncovers a dark secret in the bank vaults, and ends up fleeing Oxford, pursued by mysterious adversaries employed by the bank. It’s a spooky story, which flits between present-day Oxford, London, Wales and France — and the medieval world of Chretien de Troyes. The Holy Grail seems to be, well, the Holy Grail of publishing, so this page-turner should sell well.

The Last Letter From Your Lover Jojo Moyes (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99) Love, loss and adultery feature in the award-winning romantic novelist’s latest story, in which a journalist comes across a letter from 1960 in her newspaper archives written by a man asking his lover to leave her husband. The journalist then gets caught in the intrigue of a past love affair, perhaps because of her own romantic entanglements with a married man.

What Alice Forgot Liane Moriarty (Michael Joseph, £6.99) Interesting tale which begins with a case of amnesia. When Alice wakes up on the floor of the gym, after bumping her head, she thinks she’s still 29, about to start life with her gorgeous husband and pregnant with their first baby. To her dismay she discovers she’s actually 39, up-tight, with three children, and a husband who hates her. Can she ever go back to being the fun-loving woman she once was?