THE FIRST HOUSE by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton £16.99, 240pp)

Doshi, a US novelist in Dubai, made the Booker shortlist in 2020 with Burnt Sugar, about a fractious mother-daughter relationship.

Her new novel, just as claustrophobic, follows a writer mum-of-two whose husband suddenly walks out.

We watch her navigate the shock while struggling to stay afloat as a parent, mired in everyday bickering with her primary-aged children over their zeal for smartphones (not helped by a meddling aunt).

Meanwhile, her work flounders as she faffs around with astrological charts in search of insight.

Although the narrator’s sense of self-pity can be offputting, we’re pinned uneasily to the page by our growing horror at drip-fed revelations of her husband’s conduct, slyly manipulative from day one.

Steadily engrossing, the novel’s scenes etch themselves onto the reader’s memory by dint of their sheer viciousness.

EXHIBITION by Alex Hyde (Granta £14.99, 256pp)

Hyde’s debut, Violets, traced the intertwined lives of two wartime women in vivid vignettes told with a poet’s eye.

She uses that same style here to portray the rocky bond between two more women – a photographer and a Tracey Emin-like painter who meet in the febrile art scene of 1990s London.

The story proceeds via glancing recollections addressed by the photographer to the painter, as they drift apart before fatefully reuniting in New York some 20 years later.

Unlike the painter, the photographer is no star, having paused work to nurse her mother – a sore point, since the painter built her fame on uncredited ‘self-portraits’ by the photographer.

More meat on the story’s bones wouldn’t have gone amiss, but it’s a compelling dramatisation of celebrity as viewed from the wings.

I MADE YOU UP INSIDE MY HEAD by Marta Pérez-Carbonell (Sceptre £16.99, 208pp)

Fiction’s parasitic relationship to life remains an evergreen source of intrigue: witness the current brouhaha over Natalie Portman, allegedly irked by her adverse portrayal in an upcoming Rachel Cusk novel.

The danger of being turned into someone else’s fictional character lies at the core of this knotty mystery set on the Caledonian Sleeper.

Alicia, a translator, is drawn into conversation with Terry, a novelist whose latest book is causing a scandal on account of its connection to a missing young Swiss man with whom he once had a sexual relationship.

As their onboard chat dances around problems of storytelling ethics, chapters from Terry’s book mingle with glimpses of Alicia’s past, including a bad relationship that made her leave her native Spain.

Fertile material, for sure, but the lack of friction between the story’s disparate elements deprives it of spark.