Herald Checklist Books: Including The House By The Lake by Thomas Harding, Margaret Atwood's, The Heart Goes Last, and Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood is published in hardback by Bloomsbury, priced £18.99 (ebook £7.79). Available now

Although cast in the same mould as her more recent work - the dystopian trilogy that began with Oryx And Crake - Atwood's latest novel lacks the sparkle, sophistication and ingenuity of its predecessors.

It opens in North America, a few years hence. An ordinary couple - Stan and Charmaine - are battling for survival amidst social and economic collapse. Unemployment has skyrocketed, services are non-existent and lawlessness is rife. They, like millions of others, are reduced to surviving on scraps, living in a car, and running the nightly gauntlet of marauding gangs.

One day, opportunity knocks in the form of the Positron Project - a 'social experiment' offering a home, stable jobs and a suburban haven from the chaos. The only catch? Every other month is spent in prison. Oh, and once inside the project, no one leaves alive. It is quite clearly a Faustian pact with the devil, but our hapless couple jump at the chance, signing away their freedom with barely a backward glance.

Once inside, Charmaine and Stan soon settle down to a life of bland conformity. But it's not long before the cracks begin to show and the pair find themselves embroiled in an increasingly implausible chain of events, as the plot veers crazily between clumsy dystopia, sordid porn fest and body-snatching thriller.

Atwood is no stranger to the weird and wonderful, as her recent novels attest. What is unusual, however, is that the rationale behind the so-called Positron project remains obscure, weakening a satire on the deadening effects of suburban life. Not only that, but the two main characters come across as implausible in their vacillations between self-deluded air-heads and calculating survivors.

On the plus side, the novel includes its fair share of witty social commentary, with clever side-swipes at the sex trade, trends towards social cleansing and the delusions of the positive thinking movement. The writing too is trademark Atwood: lucid, lyrical and blackly comic. The form is there, but the heart - far from going last - seemed to be entirely missing.

6/10

(Review by Lucy Latchmore)

FICTION

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida is published in hardback by Atlantic Books, priced £14.99 (ebook £5.39). Available now

You're not supposed to judge a book by it's cover, but in the case of The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, the mysterious cover is incredibly fitting for this enigmatic psychological thriller. The story starts with a nameless American woman travelling alone to Morocco. Throughout the novel there's a series of increasingly strange events - bag theft, stolen identities, an appearance from singer-songwriter Patti Smith and a 'run-in' with a very famous Hollywood film star - which escalates in the revelation of what caused the heroine to flee to this far-flung location by herself. For her fourth novel, author Vendela Vida has made the unusual choice to write in the second-person singular, so that everything is described from the point of view of "you" doing it. It's an effective device that puts the reader squarely in the shoes of the protagonist, making this already taut mystery thriller even more of an intense read.

9/10

(Review by Alison Potter)

Fates And Furies by Lauren Groff is published in hardback by William Heinemann, priced £14.99 (ebook £9.02). Available now

Lotto and Mathilde are a couple who appear to have it all and are the envy of their friends, even years 10 years into their marriage. But every relationship has two perspectives and Lauren Groff switches between time and viewpoints in this absorbing and intimate novel, depicting the intricacies and enigmas of a modern marriage. Tall and charming, Lotto is born into wealth and stumbles through a wild adolescence to find love with Mathilde, an intriguing and charismatic ex-model. They marry after a short and thrilling courtship, much to the disapproval of Lotto's mother. According to Groff, the key to success in love is secrets. Mathilde's desire to quietly please, along with Lotto's dogmatic gratitude, allows their marriage to run smoothly, albeit a little muddled at times. Groff reveals the mysteries behind this power couple and as the novel develops, we ask ourselves, how much do we really know about our own spouse?

8/10

(Review by Heather Doughty)

Trigger Mortis by Anthony Horowitz is published in hardback by Orion, priced £18.99 (ebook £9.99). Available now

Alex Rider creator Anthony Horowitz follows the likes of Sebastian Faulks and Jeffery Deaver by stepping into the shoes of the late Ian Fleming to keep alive the literary reincarnation of Her Majesty's most famous secret agent. Trigger Mortis is set against the backdrop of the late 1950s space race and sees 007 take on Soviet-backed Korean psychopath Jason Sin as he attempts to blow up Manhattan and knobble the US rocket programme at the same time. The ghost of Fleming looms large over the book, of course - but also in it, with part of an unused TV script by the British writer, who died in 1964, influencing a darkly serious motor-racing subplot. Left to his own devices, Horowitz' go at 007 is a fast-paced Cold War thriller that should please literary Bond fans. The motor-racing and the climactic scene as Bond battles Sin and his minions on the New York subway, are especially good. But it also sometimes feels like a modern take on a period series: Bond doesn't seem quite as cold and brutal as Fleming's original and in a couple of places, the writer's 21st century morality seems to seep almost unconsciously through.

7/10

(Review by David Wilcock)

7 Miles Out by Carol Morley is published in paperback by Blink Publishing, priced £8.99 (ebook £3.79). Available now

Carol Morley is perhaps best known for her heart-wrenching film Dreams Of A Life, and she tugs at the heart strings once again with her debut novel, 7 Miles Out. She tells the autobiographical coming-of-age story of Ann, dealing with the suicide of her father, over the course of her adolescence and young adulthood. Morley details her sexual, musical, literary and cinematic discoveries, intertwined with the fractious and failing dynamics of a family struggling to communicate and come to terms with their own grief. The book really finds its feet in the closing chapters, as Ann begins to discover a world outside of Stockport. It left me devastated and weeping like a small child, but this bittersweet book is certainly worth investigating.

7/10

(Review by Frances Wright)

NON-FICTION

The House By The Lake by Thomas Harding is published in hardback by William Heinemann, priced £20 (ebook £8.03). Available now

Thomas Harding is the acclaimed author of Hanns And Rudolf, the bestselling account of one man's quest to bring to justice the commandant of Auschwitz. Now, in The House By The Lake, he again pulls off the admirable feat of showing us anew the history of German's troubled 20th century by focusing on a single story, in this case that of a small house by a lake in a rural suburb of Berlin that once belonged to his family. As a child, Harding's grandmother had known the place as an idyllic holiday home in an area favoured by artists and intellectuals. But as the Nazis swept to power, the house was seized from its Jewish owners and 'aryanised' - sold off at a knock-down price by the Nazis to a well-known (and gentile) composer. A man who - even though aware that the property had been both forcibly acquired and undervalued - persisted in seeking reparation for its loss long after the war. The house sat next to one of the key airfields in the Berlin airlift, was later occupied by a Stasi informant, and in 1961 found itself just on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall, within a special security zone. After reunification, squatters moved in and another chapter in Berlin's history, of those dispossessed by reunification, takes shape. As he starts to piece together this extraordinary succession of events, Harding decides to campaign for the restoration of a now derelict property as an important document in its own right. But to do so, he must help his own surviving older relatives - now resettled in London - to confront their feelings towards the land which chased them out and murdered their kin. With the narrative drive of a great novelist and the meticulous research of a great historian, Harding has crafted a moving, instructive and important book.

9/10

(Review by Dan Brotzel)

The White Road: A Pilgrimage Of Sorts by Edmund de Waal is published in hardback by Chatto & Windus, priced £20 (ebook £6.99). Available now

Long before he found literary renown through The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal was a ceramicist. Here, he combines both talents with this idiosyncratic history of porcelain. Retracing its path from China to an enraptured West (and back again), he also recounts his own history with pottery, but this is far more intriguing and less rote than the 'personal journey' obligation in much modern non-fiction. Partly, this is down to him letting it be properly personal; there's no attempt made to adopt a chummy everyman persona. Instead, all his foibles and erudition are on display; this is a guide who never lapses into art-historical pieties, but is equally happy to rhapsodise about colour and translucency, or muse sceptically on "passive-aggressive porcelain" or how "all emperors look like Dorothy L. Sayers". From Saxony, Stoke and Cornwall to the horrors of Dachau and the Cultural Revolution, it's a fascinating voyage.

8/10

(Review by Alex Sarll)

Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was W.G. by Richard Tomlinson is published in hardback by Little, Brown, priced £25 (ebook £12.99). Available now

Not much hasn't been written about cricket legend W.G. Grace, in fact even if you're not a fan of the sport, his bearded image is iconic and to many he's a role model. But it's not all cricket, and in Richard Tomlinson's new biography, Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG, he sheds light on all aspects of his life. The book uses an almost flashback style to delve into the life of Grace. Much will be common knowledge to the die-hard cricket historian, but the easy writing style and the addition of pictures through the book does make a good starting point for the casual reader. It also offers an insight into the strict social etiquette of the Victorian era, which is when the more personal side of the man, and his drive to be the best at any cost, made him cricket's first real superstar.

6/10

(Review by Phil Robinson)

CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Pied Piper Of Hamelin by Russell Brand, illustrated by Chris Riddell, is published in paperback by Canongate Books, priced £9.99 (ebook £5.70). Available October 1

Russell Brand reworks the old legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with plenty of gore and gross-out humour, in his first book for children, illustrated by the new children's laureate Chris Riddell and now available in paperback. The first of his Trickster Tales, it casts the piper, dressed in harlequin black and white and bearing a striking resemblance to the controversial comic, as the 'saviour' of Hamelin, ridding them not only of a rat invasion, but also of their over-fed, over-pampered, self-centred children. All but one, called Sam, who is bullied by all the other kids for having one leg thinner than the other - and is naturally a saint. Filled with strikingly detailed images and caricatures of modern society, that could have come from the pen of Roald Dahl - including the biggest bully, Fat Bob and his snarling dad, Sexist Dave and Noreen the bony mayor, whose "high-status job made her feel better about her knees and lack of husband" - and a torrent of references to bodily fluids, Brand's book aims to be an indictment of our myopic society, but seems little more than a vanity project along the lines of last year's Revolution and his electioneering this spring. "They say cometh the hour, cometh the man", but like the piper, Brand might just lead our kids astray.

6/10

(Review by Kate Whiting)

BESTSELLERS FOR WEEK ENDING SEPTEMBER 26

HARDBACKS

1. Grandpa's Great Escape by David Walliams

2. Everyday Super Food by Jamie Oliver

3. Leading by Alex Ferguson

4. Make Me by Lee Child

5. Username: Evie by Joe Sugg

6. After You by Jojo Moyes

7. Guinness World Records 2016

8. Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett

9. My Story by Steven Gerrard

10. KSI: I Am A Bell-End by KSI

(Compiled by Waterstones)

PAPERBACKS

1. After The Crash by Michel Bussi

2. Gut: The Inside Story Of Our Body's Most Under-Rated Organ by Giulia Enders

3. A Spool Of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

4. Listen To the Moon by Michael Morpurgo

5. List Of The Lost by Morrissey

6. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

7. Lamentation by CJ Samson

8. I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

9. Gorsky by Vesna Goldsworthy

10. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

(Compiled by Waterstones)

EBOOKS

1. As the Crow Flies by Damien Boyd

2. Head in the Sand by Damien Boyd

3. I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

4. Make Me by Lee Child

5. Swansong by Damien Boyd

6. After You by Jojo Moyes

7. The Martian by Andy Weir

8. Kickback by Damien Boyd

9. After Anna by Alex Lake

10. My Sister's Secret by Tracy Buchanan

(Compiled by amazon.co.uk)