A pack of suicidal saddos

From Nick Hornby's latest offering, A Long Way Down, which reads like a screenplay and not a particularly good one, to A N Wilson's creepy but beautifully handled twist on Henry James's The Turn Of The Screw, we give you a round-up of the latest book releases....

On New Year's Eve, four characters (a shamed TV presenter, an American wannabe rock star, a Catholic mother of a disabled son and a politician's troubled daughter) meet on Topper's Roof (an infamous launch pad for suicides) and form a gang.

Strangely, for a book about misery and despair, the tone is light throughout. Using alternating monologues, Hornby never fully exploits the possibility that writing from four characters' perspectives offers. Each voice has the same rhythm of speech, self-consciousness and over-use of metaphors and pop references.

He's still capable of being funny and providing insight into what makes people - especially men - tick. But you have to wade through a lot of waffle to get to the good bits.
Graeme Green

Jacques, a Spanish academic living in England, has been hired by the enigmatic Tupra for his unusual ability to perceive the minutiae of motivation and character in complete strangers. Tupra is involved in some form of espionage that he keeps almost entirely private from Jacques. For his part, Jacques is more intrigued by the role their mutual friend, Peter Wheeler, may have played in Spain in 1936.

Marias weaves philosophy, memoir, history and anecdote with the same abstract quality that shapes the writing of W G Sebald but the results suffer from a protracted style that rules out narrative tension. MarÃŒas is an enigmatic writer but his novel is overwhelmed by its endless contemplation on perception versus truth.
Claire Allfree

The former all set their work in Croatia and invariably send up the rich seam of prejudice and arrogance that springs from England's history as a colonial power and that defines the popular image of an Englishman abroad: no more vibrantly so than in Niall Griffiths's surreal satire Split.

The latter are the more interesting, however: wired, hedonistic and fantastically vibrant snapshots of a people determined to break free from the shadow of history and embrace the present.
CA

American PhD student Sallie Declan is in London to write her thesis on Turn (as she calls it) but things are not going well for this troubled woman. So she breaks from her studies and takes up the post of nanny to two children in a large country house.

The fact that James's masterful novella is such a constant presence gives a chilling presentiment of the horrors to come but Wilson also plays on modern concerns to great effect: the loneliness of big city life, mental illness and who looks after the children while you're at work.
Siobhan Murphy