The Great Stinkby Clare ClarkPenguin, £12.99, pp. 358, ISBN 0670915300
The Second Life of Samuel Tyneby Esi EdugyanVirago, £10.99, pp. 278, ISBN 1844081060
The Icarus Girlby Helen OyeyemiBloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0747575487
With an aversion to ghost stories I was surprised to find myself greatly moved by Strangers. Like the author, Taichi Yamada, Haidi is a scriptwriter. Orphaned as a child and divorced from his wife (‘the bond uniting us had become indifference,’ he notes with a professional writer’s economy), to save money he lives in his high-rise office, a deathly quiet place once emptied of its daytime inhabitants. The vacuity of endless ‘lighthearted promises and hollow assurances’ between media friends is matched only by his own sense of emptiness.