Lost, by Lucy Wadham (Faber & Faber, £6.99 in UK)

When a small boy goes missing on a Mediterranean island, his distraught mother is not reassured by the appearance of the officer in charge of the investigation into her son's disappearance: "He was small, perhaps a little shorter than her, and so slight in his clothes, they might be empty if it weren't for the hands, which seemed to hang from his cuffs, too large and square . . ." Lucy Wadham conjures up not only the merciless light of a southern summer, but the overheated atmosphere of a rural backwater populated by men who are armed to the teeth, restless and bored, and women who are accustomed to suffering in silence, but profoundly tired of it. As the story unfolds, one day at a time, Wadham manages both to increase the tension and maintain a sense of dreamy unreality in this stylish, intelligent dΘbut novel.