Margaret Drabble : The Dark Flood Rises

Margaret Drabble has been described as a writer who has ‘achieved a panoramic vision of contemporary life’. She has written women’s lives from student days in The Summer Birdcage through motherhood in The Millstone and falling out with children in The Witch of Exmoor. She has also written biography and memoir and now in The Dark Flood Rises she turns her vision to old age and the approach of death. Her title is taken from a poem by D H Lawrence The Ship of Death,

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

Jennifer Croft : The Extinction of Irena Rey

Eight translators make their seventh pilgrimage five miles to the Belarusian border to the home of the woman they refer to as Our Author. The translators are known by their languages: Serbian, Slovenian, English, and the narrator Spanish. Swedish is new, taking the place of Czech who, they are told, has died.

Paul Murray: The Bee Sting

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is his fourth novel, and like An Evening of Long Goodbyes, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. He is an Irish writer, and like many other Irish writers, writes about the family and the state of Ireland, or, as here, lets the despair and break-down of family life, speak for life in Ireland and in the wider world.