Fiction

A spoiler-free review of The Wild Beneath by Kelly Anderson: a debut built in five tidal movements around a coastal town destroyed by a tsunami, superb on grief and salvage, less sure about the man who walks out of the surf.

A spoiler-free review of Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour: twenty-one years of a Creole painter's life from New Orleans to Watts, told in a present tense that refuses hindsight and counts what concealment costs.

A spoiler-free review of The Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig: a five-event tournament, a knight with no memory, a gargoyle who steals the book, and a duology close that trades one grief away too cheaply.

Eight students spend the summer of 1993 emptying a Victorian house in the woods. Its owner lived there alone for sixty years and filled fifty rooms floor to ceiling, leaving two narrow crawl-channels through the rubbish. He also left a book of poetry, and the poetry is a lock.

Two girls murdered three years apart. A town that decided the case was closed when a convenient stranger was shot dead. And a grandmother whose dementia keeps producing the same six words, in a voice that is not quite hers: they say a girl died here.