Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, £6.99 in UK)

This first novel, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award last week, spans three generations of a working-class family in York, focusing on rituals of birth and death, punctuated by this century's landmarks - the two world wars and the Queen's coronation - and dominated by the monstrous Bunty, the narrator's mother. Shifting from past to present, from first to third-person narrative voice, Atkinson brings a heavily ironic, blackly comic tone to scenes of perfunctory sex and loveless marriage between strong women and weak men. Mildly entertaining, but repetitive in its self-mocking treatment of emotional impoverishment. Over-praised, and a very surprising prize-winner.