I couldn't get over the length of the first sentence of Emma Richler's book, Feed My Dear Dogs (Harper Perennial, £7.99), because I think it's about the longest opening sentence of a novel that I have ever read, if you don't count that book by I-forget-whom which is just one sentence long and lasts for the entire 250 pages or so, though I am sure there must be a whole load of grammatical tricks just to keep the sentence going without putting so much as a tiny full stop in it until the very end, and, to be honest, I haven't read that book in any case.

My first reaction was to wonder whether I could carry on, if the whole book was like this. But it is, and I could because the book grabs you by the coat tails and won't let you go. It is like listening to a garrulous old family friend telling you their life story, moving seamlessly from one topic to the next without a breath, and you just can't help yourself but be interested in what they are saying let alone get away, even if you wanted to.

The narrator is middle child of five, Jem Weiss, who tells in a stream of consciousness stories of her family life past and present and little snippets of information that come her way and fascinate her, such as gravity and cowboys, Shakespeare and William Herschel. These are intertwined with stories from the convent school which she and her sisters attend, with Playground Nun, Dining-Room Nun, Mean Nun, all so devilish. There are flashbacks to the birth of her youngest sibling, Gus; descriptions of her sports-writer dad and her unflappable, beautiful mother; and general nuggets of wisdom along the way.

It's a glorious story of an endearing childhood family life at its richest, told by a most perspicacious narrator. Full of humour, knowing and unknowing, as well as the passion and warmth of family bonds. It's a real delight, but bittersweet too.

From a family idyll to a family nightmare Little Face (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) is an exceptionally thrilling thriller written by Sophie Hannah. In this terrible story, Alice Fancourt has just given birth to her first child, Florence. When the baby is two-weeks-old, her mother-in-law Vivienne encourages Alice to go out for a couple of hours without the baby. And when Alice returns, there is a baby in the nursery, but it is not her daughter.

Here the nightmare begins, with a downwards spiral into true darkness and depraved behaviour, nothing short of mental breakdown. Alice's husband and his mother insist that the baby is Florence; Alice is almost deranged for the loss of her baby, and becomes convinced that there is more to the death of her husband's first wife than a stabbing by a stranger. The truth comes out in the end, and none too soon for Alice and the reader. This is Sophie Hannah's first psychological crime thriller she is best known as a poet and, judging by this book, it should not be her last.

Jill Dawson's Watch Me Disappear (Sceptre, £12.99) is also based on the disappearance of a child. Sparked by the true-life abduction and murder of Holly and Jessica in Soham in 2002, this novel explores the consequences of dealing with the disappearance of a child who has still not been found. The opening scene has Tina Humber, a marine biologist, on a working holiday on the coast of Malaysia with her husband and ten-year-old daughter Poppy. A sudden flash of panic about Poppy in the water, with a shark heading towards her, triggers a momentary vision of Tina's childhood friend, Mandy Baker, who was the same age ten when she disappeared 30 years ago. And thus the thoughts and the doubts begin.

Tina cannot stop thinking about Mandy, and about her own tempestuous childhood. In her mind, she constantly replays the events of her young days especially with Mandy and the time before and after her father's unnatural death. She is invited back to England for her brother's wedding, and finally decides to go (they were never close) partly driven by the urge to put before him all her thoughts and conclusions about Mandy's disappearance.

Watch Me Disappear captures the eternal restlessness of those who are left when a body has never been found, and the worst imaginings of what might have happened.

Philippa Logan