The Sea John Banville (Picador, £7.99) oLast year's Booker Prize winner, this book is narrated by Max Morden, who after the death of his wife returns to the Irish coastal town where he spent a childhood holiday and where his life was changed by his encounter with the Grace twins, Chloe and Myles. Max, now a rather unlikeable retired art historian, is supposedly at work on a book on the French painter Pierre Bonnard, though it seems unlikely that he will finish his book. He is waiting for death, with the sea a metaphor for the ebb and flow of life. Banville's lyrical prose compensates somewhat for the lack of action, but he uses obscure words which may lead some readers to turn to a more readable novel rather than a dictionary.

Zorro: The Novel Isabel Allende (Harper Perennial, £7.99) oAllende is known for her literary, feminist stories set in Chile, but this is a swashbuckling adventure story that tells how Diego de la Vega became the masked man of legend and of the film starring Antonio Banderas. The story has obvious resonance today, given the treatment of Mexicans who try to emigrate to the US. Diego's father was an aristocratic Spanish military man turned landowner, his mother a Shoshone warrior. Diego learns from his maternal grandmother, White Owl, the ways of her tribe while his father teaches him the art of fencing and cattle branding. In a country chafing under the corruption of Napoleonic rule, Diego joins La Justicia, a secret underground resistance movement devoted to helping the powerless and the poor.

Friendly Fire Patrick Gale (Harper Perennial, £7.99) oSophie is a bright child who has spent all her life in a children's's home. Her life is transformed when she wins a scholarship to Thatham's, a kind of Oxbridge university for teenagers. She loses herself in books, and falls hopeless in love with Lucas, adored son of a wealthy, Jewish family. But he turns out to be gay, and Sophie is drawn into a complicated world for which her education has not prepared her.

In The Fold Rachel Cusk (Faber, £7.99) oCusk specialises in dysfunctional families, and her fans will not be expecting a happy-ever-after ending. Here she punctures the idealistic view of student Michael, who is enraptured by the bohemian family of his college friend Adam Heywood, and their West Country farmhouse, Egypt. Sixteen years later, with his own marriage in trouble, he revisits the utopia of his youth and discovers that the Heywood family is falling apart as well.