A FATAL LOVE by Louisa Treger (Bloomsbury £18.99, 240pp)

This fictionalisation of the Ruth Ellis story begins with her shooting her lover David Blakely. Arrest, trial, incarceration and execution follow.

In and among are flashbacks of Ruth’s life, including a grubbily glamorous 1950s London where she worked as a nightclub hostess.

We meet her prison guards, too, and her increasingly desperate defence counsel. While Ellis is shown very sympathetically, Blakely appears as abusive, manipulative and fatally irresistible.

Throughout, Treger’s concise style perfectly counterpoints all the drama and violence.

Unbearably tense and utterly harrowing, this superb novel’s most tragic figure is the one truly innocent party, Ellis’s small son Andy.

Tragic victim of harrowing Ruth Ellis tale

THE GOOD PARTS by Evann Normandin (Piatkus £20, 352pp)

This stirring debut is a sort of sci-fi rom-com. Rose and Landon met at college in Vermont, got married and had a daughter.

But as the novel progresses, we realise that something awful befell the baby.

The action flips between Rose in the blissful past and Landon in the ghastly present, where he’s come searching for his ex-wife, who’s moved to Edinburgh.

She’s taken a ‘forgetting’ pill so she can’t recall what happened and has started a new life.

But there are side-effects, including Landon’s determination to reconnect.

I had to suspend my disbelief a bit, but it’s a powerfully emotional, compelling read.

SOPHIE, STANDING THERE by Meg Mason (Bloomsbury £20, 352pp)

A famous writer is the focus of this quirky, clever emotional comedy.

Passionate reader Sophie works for an events venue hosting book festivals.

Her despair at the ending of her toxic marriage becomes obsession with a famous but distant novelist.

When, incredibly, the novelist appears at one of Sophie’s festivals, a relationship of sorts begins. But can it live up to Sophie’s imaginings? And what does the author want anyway?

After a somewhat slow start, this novel really caught fire and I loved it.

Full of brilliant detail and simultaneously funny and serious, it notices every aspect of modern loving and living.