In his searching new novel, Martin Amis interweaves a Holocaust organisational black comedy with the agonising story of a conflicted prisoner.

Helen Oyeyemi has a determination to explore what happens when we have to operate without a stable sense of ourselves or those around us.

Most writers might prefer their works to stand in for biography in the messy stand-off with posterity; fat chance in a culture obsessed with not only retrieving the facts of who…