Taduno’s Song by Odafe Atogun (Canongate, £8.99)

The exiled protest singer Taduno has been living outside Nigeria for only three months when he receives a letter from his girlfriend Lela urging him to return. When he gets back to Lagos, Taduno finds that no-one recognises him. Brutal beatings from government forces have robbed him of his distinctive voice, so he can’t prove his identity that way and all records of his existence have been erased. With Lela languishing in prison, Taduno is presented with a dilemma: continue to protest on behalf of the oppressed people of Nigeria or secure Lela’s release from prison by becoming a mouthpiece for the dictatorship. Atogun’s debut novel is a dystopian satire in which a retelling of the Orpheus myth is spiced up with fantastical and Kafkaesque elements while also invoking the memory of Nigerian musical icon Fela Kuti. As political as it is, the characters are never reduced to mere cyphers and Atogun keeps us in suspense to the very end.

Selection Day by Aravind Adiga (Picador, £8.99)

In his latest novel, Booker-winning author Adiga uses cricket as the lens through which to study contemporary India, as an impoverished chutney-vendor in Mumbai raises his two sons, Radha and Manju, to be the best and second-best cricketers in the world. Or so he hopes. Surprisingly, Manju eclipses his brother, even though he’s more interested in watching CSI than playing cricket, but both boys attract the attention of legendary scout Tommy Sir, which brings serious money into the equation. It’s an engrossingly told story, in which Manju is tempted by his rich, Muslim and gay friend Javed to follow his heart and leave cricket behind entirely. As always, the economic realities of India are uppermost in Adiga’s mind. He takes the opportunity to examine how corruption and the illusion of social mobility have infected the country’s institutions in this intelligent and sceptical critique, also drawing a parallel between cricket and India’s laws against homosexuality as redundant relics of colonial times.

The Year Of The Drought by Roland Buti (Old Street, £10.99)

The summer of 1976 is well remembered here as a scorcher, but for Swiss farming family the Sutters it’s ruinous. Their crops are failing in the parched soil, the chickens on which they depend are dying in their hundreds, despite their expensive air-conditioned barn, and their old horse seems to have decided it just wants to find a nice tree to die beside. When Mrs Sutter invites her friend, the glamorous, hippyish Cécile, to come and stay with them, 13-year-old Auguste feels a twinge of longing, but his realisation of the true nature of his mother’s relationship with Cécile stirs up a much more complex mixture of emotions. On some level, the whole family, even the animals, can sense that this meteorological catastrophe heralds the end of their way of life. Having won multiple awards in Switzerland, this powerful coming-of-age novel about a boy watching his family implode now appears in an eloquent and poetic English translation.