The Last Family in England, by Matt Haig (Jonathan Cape, £10.99)

This novel is all about dogs, but abandon hope all ye who were raised on 101 Dalmatians, for this canine dystopia is as black as its labrador narrator. The set-up is this: everywhere today the nuclear family is under threat from the pressures of modern life; but labradors, symbol of English family stability, have made a pact to turn the tide. This pact, narrator Prince tells us, includes rules like “Duty over all” and “Learn from your elders”, and any lab who fails in his duty might as well hang up his lead - or join the rebel springer spaniels, whose slogan is “Dogs for Dogs, not for Humans”. On the face of it, Prince’s family, the Hunters, seems promising - faithful Adam, obsessively neat Katie, teenagers Hal and Charlotte. But Prince soon finds himself out of his depth as he tries to head off adultery and drugs overdoses. Don’t look for a happy ending, but be entertained along the way.

Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts (Little, Brown, £16.99)

Here is an author’s story that is bigger than his novel and, since Shantaram is an Australasian bestseller and weighs in at more than 900 pages, this is some feat. Roberts comes clean about the thinly disguised autobiography - but what an autobiography. Our author/narrator escaped from an antipodean jail, into which he’d been cast for drug offences and violent robbery, and made his way to Bombay. Over the next 10 years he established a medical clinic, worked in Bollywood, was a forger and smuggler for the Bombay mafia and fought with guerrillas in Afghanistan before being recaptured (not forgetting his spiritual regeneration along the way). Shantaram is a curious mixture of adventure story and travelogue, with too much cod-philosophy: more successful is the vivid and compassionate panorama of the places and people he encounters. Perhaps the most impressive fact is that Roberts wrote the book three times - the first two drafts were destroyed by his jailers.