New fiction

It is a novel, but reads like the truth, and is in fact based on a true story that took place in China in 1979, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.

The story centres on a young woman called Gu Shan, who has been sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Communism. She is 28 years old and has already spent ten years in prison, an unrepentant revolutionary.

The book opens with her parents waking up on the day of their daughter’s execution, the spring equinox, lost in their grief, their morning routine suddenly wrested from them.

Their shared pain is deepened and split by the mother’s belief in her daughter, the father’s doubt in what she had become.

Such is the effect of the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese, that people were afraid to think for themselves, and indeed became unable to do so.

Yiyun Li’s novel paints a heartbreaking, heartrending picture of China at that time, through the lives of Gu Shan’s parents, and of other citizens in the town who become caught up in the subsequent rebellion and the remorseless turn of events.

An uncomfortable read, but an important one, chronicling the reality of oppression and the dangers that it brings.

In complete contrast, The Yellow Room by Christopher Bowden (Langton & Wood, £8.99) is quintessentially English.

Set in the present with look-backs to post-war Britain, it follows a young woman, Jessica Tate, who is drawn into a mystery that has remained unsolved for more than half a century.

After her grandmother’s funeral, looking through a box in the old lady’s bedroom, Jessica finds an old guide to a country house called Brockley House. Inside the guide are a newspaper cutting and a photograph of a young man.

Needless to say, Jessica soon makes a visit to Brockley, and becomes intrigued in particular by the significance of the Yellow Room. As does the reader, for this is an intriguing book, full of family mysteries and deception, a crime committed on Coronation Day, and the gradual untangling of all the loose ends.

Cecilia Ahern can usually be relied on for a good rollicking read. The Book of Tomorrow (HarperCollins, £14.99) is no exception, chronicling the fortunes of a dysfunctional family and a magical diary.

No pretence of fact here — this is the story of a young woman who has everything, materially.

But then her financial and family world collapse — her father commits suicide, and her mother becomes a ‘walking corpse’, as Tamara says.

Mother and daughter sell up and move to the country to stay with relations. And here the story begins – with the appearance of a travelling library, and a large leather-bound volume that she borrows.

There’s family deception in this novel, too, but also certain comedy with nuns, strange love affairs, and, most of all, a love affair with the library book and all that it reveals.

Death is also at the start of Sarah Shepard’s book All the Things We Didn’t Say (Harper, £6.99), and is a strong thread throughout.

There’s a teenage party, emotions running high, a stealing of a girlfriend, and a horrific car crash. A girl is killed, and a boy is forced to leave his home town, carrying nothing but a secret.

Then the book fast-forwards, to Summer Davis and her parents. Or rather, her father, because her mother soon abandons them without leaving a trace of where she’s gone.

Then it’s just Summer, because her father descends into mental illness, and her brother is totally remote.

It’s a hard life for Summer, but as she grows up, she realises that perhaps she can escape the legacy of despair, and that her future could lie in her own hands.

Sentimental, but with a message about how the fallibility of parents can make you stronger and how, although it’s impossible to forget what happens in your childhood, you have the power to define your own future.