Mothers and daughters - who would have them? Here are two books with this particular relationship as the main theme. They are very different books, with a complicated, topsy-turvy, seesaw balance and imbalance between the generations.

Salvage by Jane F. Katapish (Faber, £12.99) has the additional complication of the narrator's unborn sibling - possibly a sister, though she doesn't know for sure. Anyway, her mother, Lois, suffered a miscarriage, and so the promised sibling never arrived. Or rather, as far as our narrator is concerned, the baby never arrived in person, but lived as a very real figment of her imagination in the closet - a pyromaniac named Nancy, and very much part of the narrator's daily life. And a liability at that.

There's a great deal to salvage in this novel - for the mother, for our narrator, and for the friends that they separately make. Not to mention the bizarre incidents in their lives: Lois with her string of men with saints' names and saints' inclination - is this coincidence, imagination, or actual fact?

Meanwhile, our narrator suffers a terrible trauma on the New York subway, which turns her increasingly into herself and sends sanity scurrying. Here is much to be salvaged too. She is fortunate in a new friend in her new neighbourhood, but her mother is never far distant. It's hard to decide whether the mother or the daughter is the more eccentric.

This is a rich novel of emotions, overt and beneath the surface, with an entertaining cast of characters, some real, some unreal, and some of indeterminate existence. It is not troubling to read, despite the troubles of the narrator, but delicate, fascinating, well-observed and thought- provoking.

Richard Mason's novel The Lighted Rooms (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99) also involves a mental world outside the norm, this time inhabited by the mother. The larger picture is of a businesswoman daughter Eloise, successful in her hedge-fund operation, and her 80-year-old mother, Joan. The time has come when Joan can no longer live on her own; Eloise doesn't want to give up her own independence, so Joan is booked into a home, The Albany, which is precariously too grand even for Eloise's income.

Before the move, Eloise takes Joan on a magnificent trip to South Africa, to find her roots - which, it turns out, are buried beneath a shopping centre. Here Joan finds the spirits of the past stirred to life; these long-dead spirits, her own instincts as a generous human being and as a once gifted pianist all combine, and The Albany takes on a very different appearance.

Mason's portrait of old age, and the mental trials of uprooting, is sympathetically and acutely drawn. And alongside this portrait is the image of the bossy City daughter, whose fierce independence crumples at the edges as she gambles a fortune on an ill-advised tip from an ex-lover. Eloise's life as she knows it teeters on the brink; Joan's outward life teeters too, though inwardly she becomes very happy, with an unlikely new friend and her visiting spirits.

There's a lot that will resonate in this powerful, delightful novel, interestingly written, with snippets of British concentration camps during the Boer War, 21st-century hedge-fund disasters, and a realistic picture of an old people's home. Not a comfortable read, but an engaging one, peopled by engaging characters.