MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Abby and Elise are girlhood best friends in Michigan (“like the Bronte sisters, we’d created our own womb of imagination”). In middle school they are both drawn into surreal-indie filmmaker Auguste Perren’s work. When Elise begins her ascent as a Hollywood starlet, Abby is abandoned to an isolated life, making bizarre outsider art, and rarely leaving her bedroom. The two renew their loving bond at their tenth high-school reunion. Soon Abby is living in Malibu as Elise’s assistant, providing emotional support while envying her success. Elise has joined Perren’s artistic incubator, which Abby secretly joins to explore her own talents. Acampora’s kaleidoscopic narrative shifts fluidly from Abby’s strange, shimmering images to Elise’s descent into tabloid erasure, artfully tracking the unexpected power shift between them. (Credit: Grove Press)

Novelist Hemon brings his piercing sardonic vision to a perfectly matched dual book. The first is a loving memoir of his parents, who were displaced by the war in Bosnia, and relocated to Hamilton, Canada. The second is a collage of indelible memories of growing up in Sarajevo – “pondering the unattainability of girls,” discussing Pink Floyd, practicing Jerry Lewis moves. “When sorrow comes it comes not as single spies, but in battalions,” he writes in a section describing the death of his mother’s older brother and Yugoslavia’s entry into World War Two. By the end of This Does Not Belong to You, as six-year-old Hemon drives with his father across a flooded road into the “unpaved future ahead”, we’ve witnessed the birth of an unparalleled storyteller. (Credit: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The mathematical genius who narrates Chung’s second novel identifies with the tenth muse, who gave up immortality to sing her own songs, instead of in the voices of men: “she is the tale embodied,” Chung writes. By the age of eight or nine, Katherine, the daughter of a Chinese mother and a US veteran, has discovered her purely intuitive gift for maths and its attendant pattern-making. Late in life, she is on the cusp of the solution to the Riemann hypothesis, which “predicts a meaningful pattern hidden deep within the seemingly chaotic distribution of prime numbers”. It is the eighth of 23 unsolved mathematical problems first presented in 1900, a mystery Katherine believes she was born to unravel. But first, she must solve the question of her birth, her parents, and her identity. (Credit: Ecco)

We meet 85-year-old Claude Ballard, in 1962 in the lobby of Hollywood’s faded Knickerbocker Hotel. He’s a silent-film-era pioneer, now making his way by foraging mushrooms and herbs. Claude’s backstory unspools in meticulous silver-toned detail through interviews with Martin Embry, a film student eager to hear about his lost masterpiece, The Electric Hotel. Claude’s first viewing of a Lumiere reel in 1895 in Paris sets his path. Encounters with a legendary French actress, Sabine Montrose, Australian daredevil stuntman Chip Spalding, and a loyal crew create the filmmaking team that sets up in Fort Lee, New Jersey. But there’s a glitch. Thomas Edison is determined to squash the competition through patent law. A glorious ode to the luminous art that ushered in Hollywood’s film era. (Credit: Sarah Crichton Books, FSG)

Habila’s latest is a resonant, relevant novel narrated by a Nigerian-born graduate student relocated to Berlin in the fall of 2012. His US wife is on an art fellowship to create a series of portraits she calls “Travelers”, based on images of real migrants. His own encounters with African asylum seekers evoke dislocation, deprivation and brutal poverty. There’s Mark, a Malawian film student squatting with friends in an old church in Kreuzberg, until it’s raided by police; Manu, who works as a bouncer at the Sahara Nightclub to support his 12-year-old daughter, and Portia, the disillusioned daughter of an exiled Zambian poet, whose resistance led to prison and then international literary fame. The narrator’s experience in an Italian refugee camp sets up the devastating final section. (Credit: WW Norton)

In this intriguing, obliquely told tale of complex mother-daughter ties, Wieland delves into mysteries and questions about a year in Elizabeth Bishop’s life – a crossroads in 1937 after graduation, when she’s living in Paris with college roommates. It’s one of the few years not covered in Bishop’s journals, at a time when she was writing early poems influenced by the rise of fascism (including the early poem that Wieland takes as her title). It’s also shortly after the death of her mother, who had been in a mental institution since Bishop was five. Bishop meets expatriates like Sylvia Beach, and also a woman who convinces her to come with her to Normandy to help save Jewish infants in occupied France because, she explains: “The children cannot help themselves.” (Credit: Simon & Schuster)

It’s October 1999. Paris-based private investigator Aimée Leduc is set to give the keynote at a tech conference, pitching her agency’s new computer-security services, when she receives an urgent message. Her mother, Sidney, once on Interpol’s most wanted list, has disappeared. Aimée must pick up her daughter Chloe from her Bel-Air playgroup out in the 12th arrondissement. There, Aimée discovers a homeless woman knifed to death, and learns from a waiter that the woman met regularly with Sidney. Searching for her mother, Aimee is forced to fight for her life as she uncovers a circle of international players, including a South African Foreign Legion operative, a promising presidential candidate from the Cote d’Ivoire, a French “shadow puppeteer” and the son of a former French president. (Credit: Soho Crime)

Mason sets the stage for his engaging historic mystery with a brief scene in December 1859, when Queen Victoria’s Honours List recommends that Charles Darwin – whose On the Origin of Species had been published three weeks earlier to “enormous uproar” – be knighted at year’s end. But it is not to be. The following June, while Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are at a public appearance in the West End, she survives an assassination attempt – one of eight during her nearly 64-year reign. Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field, immortalised by Charles Dickens in his 1853 Bleak House as the morally ambiguous Detective Inspector Bucket, is charged with unravelling what turns out to be a far-reaching conspiracy. Darwin’s theories are the reason for murder and mayhem, led by Decimus Cobb, “death dressed up like a man.” (Credit: Algonquin)

Emily is turning forty, grieving after a miscarriage, when she inherits her aunt and uncle’s deteriorating summer camp in Massachusetts, where she had gone as a girl. She and her husband David settle into the former director’s house, and contemplate reviving the fading grounds. One hot July day while walking through the woods, she discovers Stella, a 22-year-old waitress, who has created a makeshift home in one of the cabins. Emily begins to fantasise about Stella, wondering how she might view this place, with its faded wallpaper, smooth wood floors, and framed images on the mantles, all their “comforts and calculations.” Drawing from Emily’s memory, her grief, her attraction to Stella, and her confusion about her marriage, Shapiro shapes a mysterious and evocative novel. (Credit: Catapult)

International lawyer Persson Giolito addresses the question of guilt in provocative ways in her new thriller, translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles. She opens in 1998 with Katrin, a nervous 15-year-old, dressing to welcome a date to her parents’ home for dinner. Within hours a neighbour calls the patrol car because her dog is barking crazily. Convicted of Katrin’s murder and of molesting his own daughter, Stig Ahlin, a Karolinska Institute researcher, becomes one of Sweden’s most notorious inmates. Challenged by her former law professor, Sophia Weber takes his case 13 years after his life term begins. Is Stig Ahlin a cold-blooded killer? Or the victim of “the greatest judicial scandal in modern Swedish history”? Persson Giolito maximises suspense by toggling between the original investigation and Sophia’s ever more ambivalent follow-up. (Credit: Other Press)