MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Helen is a professor of physics at MIT, a single mother by choice, a rationalist by nature, who discovered the Clapp-Jonnal theoretical model with her colleague Neel. After the sudden news that her Harvard roommate Charlotte (nicknamed Charlie) has died, she begins receiving text messages from beyond the grave and seeing Charlie in unexpected places. Charlie suffered from lupus and hastened her end with pills, leaving behind her husband Terrance, daughter Simmi, and grieving parents who don’t trust Terrance. As surges of emotion overwhelm the bereaved, they draw closer. Helen’s son Jack and Simmi are instant playmates. Charlie’s elegant mother Addie pulls Helen into her orbit. The time-bending universe of physics creates an alluring metaphorical setting for this subtly etched exploration of love, family and grief. (Credit: Knopf)

Booker-award-winning McEwan dips back into sci-fi with his intriguing new novel, set in an alternative 1982 London, where Alan Turing’s work leads to artificial humans. Charlie, 32, has spent his savings on Adam, “the first truly viable manufactured human”, one of 25 prototypes, 13 of them Eves. Enamoured with his younger neighbour, a graduate student called Miranda, Charlie asks her to help him programme Adam’s personality. A strange love triangle develops. He is “the first to be cuckolded by an artefact,” Charlie muses when he first overhears the two of them together. Miranda is motivated by a traumatic memory, a friend’s rape and a wish for revenge against the violator – and Adam’s continuing moral development raises essential questions. “Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking,” McEwan writes. (Credit: Nan A Talese)

Mexican poet, novelist and essayist, Herbert was a child when he heard of the 1911 massacre of the Chinese community in the northern Mexican city of Torreón. Here he writes of this buried episode of the Mexican Revolution, in which around 300 Chinese immigrants were slaughtered, their corpses mutilated, their clothing removed and their belongings looted. He delves into historic records, interviews survivors and taxi drivers, and visits the site of the massacre. He frames his chronicle with the image of the country house of Walter J Lim, leader of the local Chinese community at the time of the “small genocide.” This sombre house and the nearby Ojuela bridge haunt the pages of this tragic tale. “It was the bridge of horrors. And its name is Mexico,” he writes. The book is translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. (Credit: Graywolf Press)

Beattie’s subtle and ironic observations add depth to her story about Ben, who is bundled off to boarding school by his father and stepmother in a precipitous shift triggered by a fight she unveils artfully late in the novel. Ben finds comfort in the circle of teenagers he meets in an honour society led by Pierre LaVerdere, an influential teacher who challenges them to read deeply and know enough to ask the right questions. These classmates and their mentor enter Ben’s later life in surprising ways. Beattie details with precision the ambiguities and self-deceptions of Ben and the other teenagers, and shows compassion as she tracks the missteps of a generation shaped by the 9/11 attacks. Returning at the end, LaVerdere takes the prize for backstage manipulations. (Credit: Viking)

Boyle’s 17th novel is rooted in the 1962-1963 experiments in psychotropic drugs LSD and psilocybin led by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, two young faculty members in Harvard’s psychology department. Purged from the programme, the two and their followers continued their explorations while living communally in Mexico and Millbrook, New York. Boyle begins with a brief prelude, in which a Swiss chemist and his young assistant sample the ergot derivative he synthesised in 1943. Then Boyle leaps into the minds of Fitz, one of Leary’s graduate students, and his wife Joanie. Both are initially mesmerised by the psychedelic experience, but gradually become unhinged, with strange effects on their teenage son Corey. Outside Looking In captures the beginning of an era, including a cameo appearance by Ken Kesey. (Credit: Ecco)

In this non-fiction book, Aida, born in Agua Prieta, Mexico in 1987, arrives in Douglas, Arizona with her mother as a child, attends US schools, and then has a son who is a US citizen. In August 2008, after being deported due to her undocumented status, Aida is almost “stubbed out” by a vicious knife attack after leaving her bartending job in Agua Prieta. Travelling by ambulance north to the US for medical care, she is stopped at the border, and nearly dies before being cleared by security. The call goes out to a Tucson medical centre: “Trauma red” (catastrophic blood loss). This is not the darkest of Aida’s travails as she navigates PTSD, deportation, incarceration and multiple legal battles in immigration court. A harrowing report from the Arizona/Sonora borderlands. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Imagine a wilderness where grizzly cubs are born into winter’s darkness, emerge into springtime to follow their mother as she roams mountains and descends to the valley floor to gorge, passing humans in shadowy encounters, then climb back to their dens to hibernate another winter. This is Montana’s Mission Valley, the setting for Andrews’ vivid story of a fierce mother bear named Millie and her two cubs. He gives equal time to the stewards who protect the tribal wilderness area, state biologists and wildlife group People and Carnivores, which mediates the conflict between bears and farmers, hunters, tourists and outlaws. When the grizzlies take to devouring corn from a struggling farmer’s field, tragedy strikes, and Down from the Mountain becomes Andrews’ heartfelt call for balance on the land. (Credit: HMH Books)

Eight US vice presidents have become president following the deaths of the elected incumbents. First was John Tyler, tapped to be president after William Henry Harrison died in 1841, after 30 days in office. This was the first test of constitutional rules on succession. Tyler, a Southern pro-slaver, incited an “all-out brawl on the floor of Congress,” and was excommunicated from his own Whig party. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, his slave-holding vice president Andrew Johnson oversaw post-Civil War Reconstruction, impeding black civil rights for more than a century. Lyndon B Johnson inherited prodigious foreign policy challenges in the wake of John F Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. In this colourful, surprising analysis, Cohen points out the importance of the 1967 25th amendment, which formalised Tyler’s succession. (Credit: Simon & Schuster)

It took Filgate 14 years to write the essay about her abusive stepfather and the fractured relationship with her mother that gives this anthology its title. Filgate and 14 other authors reach deep into personal history, confessing truths, breaking the silence. Alexander Chee writes of testifying against a boys’ choir director who sexually abused him and his friends; Nayomi Munaweera pieces together the borderline personality disorder that may have led to her mother’s over-controlling behaviour. Carmen Maria Machado describes how her estrangement from her mother has left her ambivalent about parenting. Leslie Jamison tracks down the unpublished novel her mother’s first husband wrote about their 1960s-era experimentation, and sees her mother’s younger self for the first time. An intimate, eloquent, memorable collection. (Credit: Simon & Schuster)

Roan is a master psychometrist, born with the rare gift of holding an object and pushing past the “scrim of time” to experience its history. (Picking up a music box in an antique store, he enters Mozart’s Vienna and sees the soprano who received it as a gift.) He’s part of a small international circle of psychometrists working to decipher the mystery of a series of “ooparts” or out-of-place artefacts. When he reads a press account of Melicent (a woman who can also sense an object's history with her hands, and picks out a $57,000 original Tiffany lamp at a swap meet) he tracks her down. Beginning with this otherworldly duo, Womack spins a suspenseful web of mysteries and murderous rivalries, connected by an underpinning of love. (Credit: Berkley)