Recommended: 10 fascinating and fantastic books to read this month

The danger is you look at the blurb and think, “Another book about Burke and Hare and the West Port Murders. Not for me.” But this isn’t some grand guignol revisiting of past horrors. Rather, The Specimens reframes what might seem a familiar - even overfamiliar - story by shifting the emphasis from the murderers to the women who play a part of the story - in this case Helen MacDougal, Burke’s common law wife for a decade, and Susan Knox, who was married to Robert Knox, the surgeon at the heart of the story. The result is a work of fiction that is both a potent portrait of early 19th-century Edinburgh but also a story about female agency or the lack of it. The result is a compelling, painful, haunted piece of work.

Mairi Kidd (Image: free)

Street-Level Superstar, Will Hodgkinson

Nine Eight Books, September 5, £22

Most of you will be too young to remember this, but towards the end of 1982 the record label Cherry Red released a sampler album entitled Pillows and Prayers, retailing at 99p, which became a must-own for any self-respecting indie kid. Alongside tracks by Ben Watt, Tracey Thorn, Attila the Stockbroker and the late Quentin Crisp there was an ur-Smiths jangly track from a band called Felt. At the time it felt like the announcement of a fresh new talent soon to hit the charts.

Yet despite the musical abilities of guitarist Maurice Deebank and, later, keyboardist Martin Duffy, the band never quite made it onto Top of the Pops.

Frontman Lawrence would try again with his next band Denim. He even supported Pulp on tour, but again couldn’t break through. What seemed like a surefire hit entitled Summer Smash came to grief in 1997 when Princess Diana’s death made it unplayable.

This is a portrait of one of British pop’s great eccentrics, a tale of what might have been and never was, the blame for some of which could be laid at Lawrence’s own feet. But then addiction, self-sabotage and disappearances do tend to get in the way of pop stardom.

Will Hodgkinson’s very moreish book spends a year with Lawrence, following him around the suburbs of London, looking for inspiration, old books and records while drinking cups of tea with sufficient milk in them. It’s a droll, sweet, sad account of a life well spent or misspent, depending on your point of view.

Broken Ghosts, J D Oswald

Headline, £20, September 12

Fife farmer and bestselling author James Oswald could never be accused of slacking. As well as running his farm he has published 21 novels, including epic fantasy novels and not one but two crime series.

But his latest book is a little different, which might explain the slight change in his byline. Broken Ghosts is a one-off novel which follows 12-year-old Phoebe as her world falls apart. The death of her parents mean she is forced to move from her Fife home to live with her eccentric uncle and equally eccentric aunt in a ramshackle home in the Welsh countryside.

Grieving and out of place, Phoebe spends the summer trying to come to terms with where she is and what she has lost.

As the title suggests, there is a hint of the supernatural about Broken Ghosts, but the real reward here is Oswald’s patient, engrossing evocation of a place and time and people on the margins. I think it might be the best thing he has written.

Author James Oswald at his farmhouse near Cupar (Image: Duncan McGlynn)

The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020, Diarmaid Ferriter

Profile Books, £25, September 5

At the Edinburgh Fringe this year the Dublin comedian Andrew Maxwell, heading into his sixth decade on the planet, suggested that his was the last generation to grow up in mediaeval Europe.

Such was the distance between the Ireland of his childhood and the Ireland of the 21st century. To measure the gap between then and now there is no better guide than Diarmaid Ferriter, Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin. The Revelation of Ireland is a punchy, opinionated portrait of Ireland in the last 30 years, one that takes in the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, the revelations of clerical abuse, the peace process and Ireland’s very idea of itself, via Viagra, “Enyanomics”, ghost housing estates, Irish rugby and Daniel O’Donnell. It’s also from this side of the Irish Sea a reminder of how little we know about our next door neighbour. This is the perfect primer to rectify that situation.

On the Roof: A Thatcher’s Journey, Tom Allan

Profile Books, out now

There are officially 306 thatched buildings in Scotland, though informal estimates put the figure anywhere between 200 and 600. That compares unfavourably with England where there are still 60,000 thatched roofs. Tom Allan’s memoir of his life as a thatcher is one of those quirky reads that give you an insight to a life and a craft you’ve probably never thought much about before. Allan grew up in a smallholding in the Borders but after quitting an office job he apprenticed as a thatcher and is now a master of the craft. His book sees him travelling back to his homeland as well as to Scandinavia and Japan to learn more about his life’s calling.

A thatched building in Cumbria. England retains far more of these buildings than Scotland (Image: free)

Small Rain, Garth Greenwell

Picador, £18.99, September 19

“They asked me to describe the pain but the pain defied description, on a scale of one to ten it demanded a different scale.” So begins Garth Greenwell’s new novel in which a poet finds himself in the bowels of the American healthcare system. It’s a book about the mind and the body, fear, love and the consolation of art.

The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, Jonathan Watts

Canongate, £25, September 12

The scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock died in 2022 but the mark he made in the story of science is far from fading. The father of the Gaia theory and the man behind the technology that discovered the hole in the Ozone layer, Lovelock’s was a storied career that took in jobs with NASA, MI5 and MI6 and Shell over the years. Jonathan Watt’s biography of the man draws on access to his personal papers and more than 80 hours of interviews with Lovelock himself.

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

Faber, £20, September 24

Since the publication of her debut novel Conversations with Friends, Rooney has been proclaimed the voice of her generation. Still in her early thirties she is already onto her fourth novel with Intermezzo, the story of two grieving brothers with very different lives.

Sally Rooney (Image: free)

And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, Joe Boyd

Faber, 30, out now

This actually came out at the end of August, but it’s such a monster of a book (800 plus pages) I’m still wading through it. Not that this is a chore. The legendary producer vividly tells the story of world music in a journey that jumps through space and time. Which makes And the Roots of Rhythm Remain something of a musical Tardis.

Final Cut, Charles Burns

Vintage, £30, September 24

It may come as something of a surprise to anyone who struggled with the pustular body horror of Burns’s classic graphic novel Black Hole to learn that its creator always saw it as more of a romance than a horror comic. But then Burns always has had a singular view of the world. That should only heighten the anticipation of his new graphic novel which mixes up home movies, unrequited love (or lust) and the disconnect between reality and imagination, all told in the clean-lined chill that is Burns’s style.