Malma Station

Alex Schulman
Little, Brown, £14.99, pp288

A train makes its way through summer meadows from Stockholm to Malma. On board are a moody single father and his nervous daughter, a married couple in crisis, and a young woman clutching a photo album belonging to the mother whose disappearance years earlier is an enduring mystery. It’s not immediately apparent, but these passengers and their journeys are separated by decades, each providing a vital clue to the next. The result is a delicate yet tightly woven tale of parents and children, and of how the stories of our inheritance are shaped.

Grief Is for People

Sloane Crosley
Serpent’s Tail, £10.99, pp208

In the summer of 2019 the author’s New York home was broken into and her jewellery, largely sentimental in value, stolen. A month later her closest friend, an older, intensely charismatic gay man, killed himself. In the grief-addled aftermath, she finds these two events impossible to separate, despite their wildly differing magnitudes. Their interplay spurs a supple, starkly humorous elegy, as Crosley turns sleuth in search of both the jewels and essential truths about kinship and loss. Impeccably crafted, this book pushes an already feted writer into potent new territory.

Ghosts in the Hedgerow: A Hedgehog Whodunnit

Tom Moorhouse
Penguin, £10.99, pp272 (paperback)

Nomadic and insectivorous, solitary and toddler-like in its snuffling, with a determined gait, the beloved hedgehog has been living in Britain for at least 10,000 years – until now. From an estimated 36 million in the 1950s, their number has shrunk to little more than half a million. Conservationist Moorhouse frames his quest to discover what’s behind their decline as a whodunnit, interrogating suspects from the motorist to the farmer – an affable conceit in which to cloak a sharply reasoned wake-up call.

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