Nevada Days by Bernardo Atxaga (Maclehose, £14.99)

This is a fictionalised version of the celebrated Basque novelist’s nine months as writer in residence, accompanied by his wife and two daughters, at the University of Nevada in 2007. Although living in the glow of the “green, red and fuchsia” of Reno’s casinos, Atxaga felt the pull of the vast desert surrounding the city and needed little encouragement to get out there and experience it. He conjures up a parched landscape which is very different from anything he’s known before, but which nevertheless brings back vivid memories of his youth in the Basque countryside. As he soaks up local lore and gets to know his new Reno acquaintances, the venomous spiders, snakes and scorpions are a reminder to an old European of how untamed parts of North America still are. With past and present colliding, and mingling with Atxaga’s dreams, Nevada Days works like a giant, impressionistic collage, a sober and thoughtful meditation on memory.

No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane, £12.99)

By Naomi Klein’s usual standards, this is like a guerrilla strike. Her previous books were years in the making, but this urgent, passionate critique of Donald Trump and the corporate stranglehold on politics is up to the minute, and it emerges at a point when, in Britain at least, the mainstream has never been more receptive to her viewpoint. She examines Trump in light of the insights made in No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, arguing not only that he’s the culmination of the “superbrand” but that the conditions which led to his ascent will still be there after he’s gone unless we do something about it. Her arguments are clear and powerfully presented, and No Is Not Enough summarises them for those who haven’t previously encountered her work. But this time she’s as concerned with solutions as with analysis, stressing the importance of counter-narratives, locating neoliberalism’s vulnerabilities and finding battlegrounds on which it can be challenged.

Second Sight by Sally Emerson (Quartet, £10)

Fifteen-year-old Jennifer seems to be the only person not besotted with her mother. Sarah certainly appears somewhat besotted with herself, running a restaurant and having numerous affairs under the nose of her husband, Edward, a writer. Aloof, scholarly and uncomfortable with her developing body, Jennifer eschews boys in favour of an imaginary relationship with the poet Shelley, and her belief that she has second sight, along with her interest in a murder trial her father is covering, persuades her to get in touch with a medium about conjuring up the dead. Reissued as part of Quartet’s Rediscovered Classics range, this 1980 novel kicked off a successful career for Emerson, though it’s a strange patchwork of elements. The strongest is Jennifer herself, the way this bookish adolescent sees herself and her middle-class North London family and her difficult journey to adulthood. Also notable is the relationship between Jennifer and her mother, which could almost be a prototype for Ab Fab.