THE TETHERED GOD

Barrie Condon

(Sparsile, £9.99)

More than 4500 years ago, Egyptian prince Khafre watches happily as his father’s body is prepared for mummification. He hated his father, and enjoys seeing him disembowelled. Flash forward to the present, and Khafre has been reincarnated as a police dog trained to sniff out explosives. While trying to get to grips with this disappointing new world, he searches back through his previous life in a bid to understand why the gods would have reincarnated him as a German Shepherd. It’s an original idea, which would still be readable in lesser hands, but is elevated by Condon’s narrative voice. In a book where almost every sentence is steeped in black humour, the snarky tone of an entitled princeling, trying first forge a path through his own world and then to make sense of the 21st century from the perspective of a dog, rubs up against modern sensibilities in inventive and delightful ways.

FURY

Kathryn Heyman

(Myriad, £8.99)

Heyman’s father’s nickname for her was “Little Fury”, and this memoir tells of how she learned to live up to it after failing to be “the kind of girl that fits”. Her younger self tried to escape a background of deprivation and domestic violence through books, without ever finding the female role models she sought. After years of suffering under a misogynistic culture, epitomised by a failed rape prosecution and the blaming and shaming that followed, the 20-year-old Australian drifted through poorly paid jobs, finally finding work on the trawler Ocean Thief on the Timor Sea. Joining up as a cook, she was demoted to deckhand and took on backbreaking physical work as the only woman on the five-strong crew, after which she was able to face the world reborn and empowered. Heyman’s seventh book is a moving, inspiring memoir of overcoming trauma and misogyny and becoming the hero of one’s own story at last.

LE FANU’S ANGEL

Brian Keogh

(Dedalus, £11.99)

Kieran Sheridan Le Fanu, Dublin advertising executive and namesake of the famous author, wakes from a coma following a serious car accident, but even concussion can’t explain what’s going on around him. He’s attacked by an intruder no-one else sees. Events of a full day seem to be compressed into the space of two hours. A patient who was never there dies in his room, and he gains the protection of a beautiful guardian angel. Kieran begins to suspect that he’s actually died, and what he’s experiencing is some limbo world between life and death. Keogh’s debut novel is a gripping and audaciously effective supernatural thriller, which pits his protagonist against savage spectral entities from a realm of the dead in conflicts which toughen him up for the equally crucial battles in the boardroom of his advertising agency. Through all the mayhem and gore, Keogh’s tongue is never far from his cheek.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT