Marcel Theroux has written 4 previous, highly regarded novels, none of which I've read. Apparently, this one is a bit of a change in direction, so I had no idea what to expect. It's described in the blurb as dizzying and speculative, and it is. It's presented as a found document, apparently written by one Nicholas Slopen, an academic and expert on Samuel Johnson, the 18th Century English writer, left behind at Slopen's ex-girlfriends house.

Set in Auckland during the 1998 power blackout, this wonderfully gentle, wry, funny and profound novel follows the thoughts and activities of Megan Sligo, a clothes mender, as she is drawn into a web of deceit around a cheating husband. He brings her a vintage Irish costume to repair, and she becomes so drawn in by his stories of death and tragedy in the Belfast history of his family, and the mystery of his infidelity, that she keeps him coming back by telling him that the repair is not finished.

Been reading too many books about Afghanistan? No you haven't, not until you've read this one. This is the difficult third novel from Hosseini, who, of course, had a massive success with his first novel The Kite Runner in 2003, then followed that up with the equally successful A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007. We all wondered what he would do next. Could he keep readers interested in Afghanistan in the face of many, many imitations in the years since The Kite Runner triggered so much interest in the region?

Gail Godwin has been quite a prolific writer since the 1970s, and a successful one, but this is the first I've read. Helen remembers the summer in which she turned eleven, right at the end of World War Two. Her father is away working on a secret war project, so Helen is looked after by Flora, 22, her deceased mother's cousin. Helen is crabby, supercilious and generally uncooperative, Flora is sunny, happy and relentlessly helpful. Not much happens, but the novel has an air of tension and doom; the reader knows something bad is eventually going to happen, and sure enough, it does.

This novel won America's National Book Award for fiction in 2012, and is somewhat of a return to form by Louise Erdrich, who was extremely popular in New Zealand in the 80s and 90s with books such as The Beet Queen and Tracks. I haven't seen her books around so much more recently, but I can see The Round House putting her back on the map here, and picked up by reading groups etc. This is a tremendously powerful novel, set on a Native American reservation in North Dakota.

This is a hugely enjoyable novel very much in the territory of Douglas Adams, or Red Dwarf. A mathematician working on the Riemann Hypothesis disappears. When he reappears, he behaves oddly, and has amnesia. It transpires that his body has been occupied by the consciousness of an alien, sent here to slow humans mathematical progress, as we are a too dangerous race to be allowed to discover interplanetary travel. It's an old premise, much used in serious and satirical fiction, but Haig pulls it off with originality and wit.