These are both short story collections, and although they share nothing in style, they share a lot in theme, and in quality - both are brilliant. They are both, in a way, state-of-the-nation collections, regarding contemporary America with a very acute eye. They also both use the family in various forms to explore modern domestic and suburban life in America. In tone, however, they differ significantly.

This is a very clever, very funny and at times very dark novel, with a looping structure. It starts in the middle, in 1996, when the narrator Rosemary, is 22 years old, and meandering her way through an indeterminate University degree. Her family is clearly very messed up, and the reader learns the reasons for this when the narrative loops back to the beginning of the family's story. This brings an unexpected plot development. Or two. We then move back to the present, and then into the past again, with new revelations each time.

Ben Watt is probably best known as half of the alt-pop duo Everything But The Girl, popular during the 1980s and 1990s. He has written a previous memoir, called Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness, published in 1996. This new memoir marks a very welcome return.

Peter Faber is a German soldier on the Russian front during the Second World War. He marries a stranger, Katharina Spinell. They have chosen each other from photographs in a business arrangement - he will be granted 10 days leave for his honeymoon, she is guaranteed a war widow's pension if he dies. When they do eventually meet, they are surprised to find a mutual affection developing between them. The novel then traces his experiences back at the front, and hers in Berlin as her family struggle to gain influence and privilege within the Nazi party as the German war effort unravels.

J.J. Abrams is an acclaimed and hugely successful film and TV writer and director (Fringe, Lost, Alias, Felicity, Star Trek, Cloverfield, Mission: Impossible, and more), Doug Dorst is an award-winning novelist. In this book they have created a multi-layered mystery-within-a-mystery, book-within-a-book which presents the reader with clues and twists, much in the same way as Abrams' TV series have done. Nothing is what it seems, and the reader has to work hard to decipher the deceptions. Inside the presentation slipcase is a 1949 novel by a secretive, revolutionary writer, V.M Straka.

I haven't read David Peace before, but he has a huge reputation. This is a football novel. Peace wrote a novelisation of the life of the legendary Brian Clough, The Damned United, which was filmed. This is a novelisation of the life of Bill Shankly, the near-mythical Liverpool manager responsible for turning the failed club into the giant who ruled British and European football through the 1970s. It's an epic novel, 720 pages, and is written in a repetitive, incantatory style, almost prose poetry.