Wasteland Girls by Anna Bailey (Doubleday £15.99, 304pp)

Bailey’s outstanding stories make the wide, wild landscape of America a backdrop to her intimate look at the lives of her characters as they search for redemption, revenge and love.

There’s an eerie recognition that off-kilter events can unhinge a life – from the woman who reappears from a cave after being missing for years (The Girl In The Ground), to the seemingly immortal Civil War deserter who stalks the pages of Jack The Devil. Elsewhere, it’s emotions that are unsettling, as a woman checks the progress of her wife’s dementia in Riddles, or a brother visits his estranged sibling in a tale of a troubled inheritance in Long Way To Come For A Sip Of Water.

It Will Come Back To You by Sigrid Nunez (Virago £20, 224pp)

this is the first story collection from acclaimed novelist Nunez and the 13 tales, composed over a three-decade-long writing career, capture the themes of her longer work – memory, mental illness, philosophical questions about the meaning of life and the quest for connection.

Wryly funny and slyly provocative, she excels at quick sketches of her characters – from Mrs Mint, the smitten teacher in Philosophers – ‘an unhappy woman with tastefully teased hair and large, distracting breasts’ – to Dick Franz who walks into a party ‘with his look of a warlock’ (Imagination).

Elsewhere, a Brad Pitt lookalike appears, sisters worry about their depressed siblings, and a serial killer plans a murder.

A History of Heartache is available now

A History Of Heartache by Patrick Strickland (Melville House £14.99, 240pp)

There’s a seam of desperation running through these stories as journalist Strickland’s characters try to circumvent the harsh circumstances of their upbringings. Parented by damaged people, facing into a jobless, homeless, hopeless future, drugs are an escape and a prison, and violence is just one punch away.

Peopled by the bereaved, the lost and the haunted, these stunning stories, set in the small towns of north Texas, are also shot with dark humour and fleeting tenderness.

Here, there are awkward friendships, reckless relationships, but failure is forever on the horizon in these bleak, but beautifully articulated, stories.