Our pick of this week's releases

The Last Weekend

Blake Morrison

Vintage, £7.99

Two couples, old friends, spend a long weekend together in a remote cottage in East Anglia during an unusually hot summer. It could be the material for anything from a witty comedy of manners to a murder mystery. In the hands of Blake Morrison, acclaimed novelist, poet, journalist and memoirist, it becomes an unsettling psychological thriller in which nothing, including the protagonists, is what it seems.

The narrator, Ian, and his wife, Emily, are invited by Ian’s old friend Ollie to join him and his wife, Daisy, for a weekend in the country. In the claustrophobic atmosphere, old tensions and rivalries emerge, and when Ollie challenges Ian to a series of sports challenges, the stakes become dangerously high. Ollie’s shocking revelations – he has terminal cancer, and the holiday home is the place where his father died many years ago – may not be true at all. But as the reader discovers, Ian is a terrifyingly unreliable narrator himself. ANNA CAREY

Secret Son

Laila Lalami

Penguin, £8.99

In the slums of Casablanca, a young man discovers that his mother has been lying to him. She is not the widow of a poor teacher; Youssef’s father is a rich businessman, very much alive, and married. Prompted by intense curiosity and a burgeoning sense of injustice, Youssef tracks him down. As a result, a new world opens for him – but ultimately, as his mother has predicted, it will turn on him.

Alongside Youssef’s point of view, Lalami offers those of various characters – the mother, his step-sister, his father. It’s a fair-minded approach, but the novel doesn’t really have the scope for it: character depth rather than breadth might have done the story more justice. Youssef’s trajectory of hope, disillusionment and despair is straightforward enough, but is given resonance by Lalami’s nuanced understanding of the social and religious tensions of contemporary Morocco. It is an insightful portrait, drawn with sympathetic intelligence, in honest and unburdened prose. CLAIRE ANDERSON-WHEELER

The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to be Happy

Michael Foley

Simon Schuster, £7.99

The title and sub-title say it all. The author holds a mirror up to our lives, asks us to examine the image and then tears our reflected lifestyles to shreds. What is happiness, he asks. Unlike its opposite, depression, it is hard to describe. Even Socrates had a go at it: good fortune or luck, success and prosperity, but perhaps Flaubert came closer: stupidity, selfishness and good health are the three prerequisites of happiness, he asserted, though if stupidity is lacking the others are useless. We all yearn to be younger, richer, more talented and, above all, more sexually attractive, Foley argues, and we are deranged by a toxic cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness, desire and resentment. He even calls on Proust to back his argument when he talks of the craziness and absurdity of living perpetually in expectation. All this may seem like heavy going but it’s the opposite: a hugely enjoyable read, intelligent, occasionally very funny, and, above all, thought provoking. OWEN DAWSON

Siberian Education

Nicolai Lilin

Cannongate, £8.99

Nicolai Lilin grew up in a far-flung corner of Eastern Europe where for a brief period of time criminal families, with their sacred traditions and rabid disdain for outside authority, created their own dystopian Eden. A coming-

of-age tale in the most brutal sense imaginable, this memoir recounts with no small measure of pride the Molotov cocktail attacks on police stations, knife fights with rival gangs, and ruthless vigilante justice that filled the breathless, bloody days of childhood for youths in Transnistria. Some episodes – such as an aural memory of the violent sexual assault of a boy by his feral cellmates in a juvenile prison – are remembered with harrowing clarity by Lilin. Others are recalled as thrilling crusades through a no man’s land of dishonourable enemies, each one put in his place by our blade-wielding, silver-tongued heroes. Yet Lilin’s account defies an easy reading of this chaos. His fading community, while steeped in violence and death, promotes a brand of humanity that one cannot help but admire. DAN SHEEHAN

A Wreath of Roses Elizabeth Taylor

Virago, £8.99

It's hard not to feel that the novelist Elizabeth Taylor would be much better known if only she hadn't shared her name with an iconic film star. Her beautifully written, complex and darkly witty novels deserve to reach a wider audience, and Virago's elegant new editions, complete with introductions by such high-profile fans as Sarah Waters, will with luck attract new readers. First published in 1949, A Wreath of Rosesis the story of Camilla, who is spending the summer in a country village with her old friends Liz and Frances. But now Frances seems obsessed with painting and Liz, who is unhappily married, is devoted to her baby son. Bored and lonely, Camilla is drawn to Richard Elton, an attractive young man who is staying at a local inn and who tells of his traumatic experiences as an agent in occupied France during the war. But his true story is darker and more dangerous. Compelling and unsettling. ANNA CAREY