Passage by Colin Thubron (Chatto and Windus £14.99, 144pp)

Thubron’s latest novel opens with a scene worthy of Ian McEwan. A woman lies awake on an operating table, talking, while a surgeon examines a tumour in her brain that sits there, glistening, among ‘a turmoil of pink and crimson coils’.

After the surgery, known as an awake craniotomy, Kathleen and her oafish husband Robert go on holiday to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, accompanied by Robert’s brother Alan, who has nursed a terrible unrequited love for Kathleen for decades.

Bearing the fruits of his decades as a travel writer, Thubron’s exquisitely formed novella makes plain its themes – mortality, remembrance, the limits of human knowledge – with forensic precision.

Yet as the trio’s uneasy triangular relationship works towards its inevitable conclusion, the cumulative effect is unsettling, strange and wondrous, in ways only fiction can achieve.

Life of M by Rachel Cusk (Faber £18.99, 192pp)

Cusk’s publishers must be rubbing their hands with glee at the amount of publicity this book has already generated – it’s rumoured to be loosely based on her apparently close friend, the actor Natalie Portman. (Rumour also has it Portman is unhappy with the result.)

Those expecting some sort of warts- and-all reveal, however will find the joke is on them: Life Of M is much more interested in the tension between the true self and the proximate version that those in the public eye tend to create.

There are clear nods to Portman’s film career (after one film, in which M plays a ballerina, a seasoned dancer tells M she was ‘terrible’). But seasoned readers of Cusk won’t be surprised to find a tonally formal, largely plotless novel that is deeply preoccupied by our profound contemporary cultural estrangement from reality in all its forms.

Where are the Kings by Donal Ryan (Doubleday £16.99, 224pp)

When Jack is 12, he discovers his mother’s body floating in the lake. His father spirals into madness and Jack, who narrates through a prism of heart-pinching adolescent confusion, is sent to live with his grandparents, Aunt Rose, with whom – much to his utter horror – he becomes sexually fixated, and three uncles. One is only two years older than he is.

Set in 1990s Ireland, Ryan’s coming- of-age novella has the intimation of epic tragedy but it’s also deeply rooted in domestic life as Jack learns more about the family he was born into, and what darker implications its secrets might have for him.

Mainly though, Ryan elevates a story about adolescent grief and sexual awakening with prose of vivid, gleaming buoyancy. Every sentence is a treat.