24 for 3 by Jenny Walker
Bloomsbury, £9.99 Buy the book here

Mick Jagger apparently enjoyed this novel - there's a sentence you don't see often. It's a slender little thing, winner of the McKitterick Prize for a first novel by an author over 40, and tells the story of a woman who flutters between her cricket-mad husband, her beloved teenage stepson, and a lover who is a loss-adjuster. “He does have a name,” she tells us, “but I don't want to use it in case it breaks.” Our heroine asks many searching questions about cricket and life and it is all rather charming. Some may find it a little creepy that Jennie Walker is the pen-name of Charles Boyle, 57 - but the fictional cross-dressing illuminates some unexpected places.

Good to be God by Tibor Fischer
Alma Books, £14.99 Buy the book here

Tyndale Corbett's life has hit the buffers. So he agrees to borrow the identity of his friend Nelson, a handcuff salesman who doesn't want to go to a sales conference in Miami. Once he has tasted life on expenses, Tyndale wants more. So he embarks on the craziest scam of his life. He decides to impersonate God, and before you know it, he's taking over the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. But a very difficult trick pulled off by the original - namely, dying and rising again - could pose problems. This is Fischer at his sharpest - a wildly original feelbad philosophical hayride.

Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
MacLehose, £16.99 Buy the book here

Here's an absolute peach, winner of the Giller Prize. It concerns the lives and loves of the people at a radio station on the edge of the Arctic wilderness. Harry Boyd returns to the tiny town of Yellowknife and falls in love with the voice of Dido Paris before he sees her, and the rest of her is every bit as lovely. But while he sighs over Dido, he doesn't notice his growing feelings for the spiky young Gwen. Hidden emotions surface when a group from the radio station take a canoe trip into the wilds. It's funny, beautifully written and altogether wonderful. Read it.

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