The first issue of a new biannual anthology by the former editor of Granta John Freeman. It's like Granta in that it features fiction, essays, poetry and photography, around a different theme for each issue; in this case the concept of arrival. There are new stories by Murakami, Louise Erdrich, Dave Eggers, Etgar Keret and others. As always in these kind of anthologies, the quality is variable, what is of interest to any individual reader will vary also.

The follow up to her award winning Just Kids, mostly about her friendship and relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, M Train is a kind of literary pastiche of her whole life, a fragmented series of incidents and stories, most of which carry the echo of her grief at the death some years before of her husband and muse Fred "Sonic" Smith. It's a beautifully reflective book, illustrated with her enigmatic photographs; not chronological or conventional, bit probably more profound as a result. A powerful, moving work.

Tom McCarthy has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Price twice, once for C, the second time this year, for this novel.
The narrated, known only as U., a 'corporate anthropologist' for the Company, apparently an elite consultancy based in London, who have just won a contract on the Koob-Sassen Project, apparently a giant, epoch-defining project. I use these 'apparently's deliberately, as we never really find out what the Project is, or what kind of consultancy the Company do.

At 230-odd pages, a much shorter novel than The Bone Clocks or Cloud Atlas, Slade House is set within the same universe as The Bone Clocks, but is not a sequel. It's more of a companion piece. You wouldn't have to read both, but I would recommend that you do.

A very atmospheric, low key thriller set in the Outer Hebrides, Heartland follows a classic plot - a man who couldn't wait to leave the islands as a youth returns there to rebuild himself following the end of his marriage and the loss of his job. He attempts to reconnect with his past by reconstructing an old family home, but what he finds there forces him to question everything he believes in. The plot sounds like a cliche, but the novel transcends that, through its well portrayed characters, sense of place and thoughtfulness.

The second Kent Haruf novel I've read this year, and a bit more substantial than Our Souls at Night. Plainsong follows a number of separate characters whose lives intersect in a town called Holt, in the USA's Great Plains, roughly in the present day. Haruf's prose is very plain and unsentimental, but the lives he draws are mostly very sad. That's not to say the novel is entirely without humour, there's a laconic, rural humour here that New Zealanders will recognise. The characters are flawed and struggling, but mostly decent at heart, striving to do the right thing against all odds.