They say that comparisons are odious, but the American novelist Adam Haslett will probably forgive the critics who are reaching for analogies with some of the greats. His new novel Imagine Me Gone recalls the work of JD Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley and Jonathan Franzen, according to Randy Boyagoda in the Financial Times, in that it tackles the theme of dysfunctional families. The novel connects the lives of a father and son who both have depression. Boyagoda was most beguiled by the voice of the son, Michael, which “transforms what might have otherwise been just-another-accomplished-literary-novel … into something far more affecting … a tour-de-force of manic brilliance, both zealously funny and painfully sad”. Max Liu in the i paper was reminded of Tolstoy, who famously wrote that “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Liu particularly admired “the range and intensity of the siblings’ bonds”, and concluded that “it might be the best American novel about a middle-class family since Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.” In the Daily Mail, Stephanie Cross found the novel “reminiscent at times of Anne Enright’s The Green Road … raw, tender and … hilarious.”

“Before Stefan Hertmans’s grandfather, Urbain Martien, died in 1981 he gave him a set of notebooks with memories from his life”, explained Fiona Wilson in the Times, reviewing War and Turpentine. “Now Hertmans has turned them into a rich fictionalised memoir”. Wilson argues that “continental fiction is thriving” and this novel is among the recent best. “Death, destruction, obligation, duty – Urbain faces it all and yet he still finds joy in life.” Eithne Farry in the Sunday Express also admired “this brilliant and moving imagined reconstruction”, in which the author’s imagination “beautifully [fills in] the gaps”. The Sunday Times’s David Mills “thought I’d had enough of books about the first world war. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

There was a palpable sense of anger running through reviews of Kat Banyard’s Pimp State, a furiously feminist, investigative polemic about prostitution. The book is an “excoriating account of the modern trade in women’s bodies”, wrote Joan Smith in the Observer. “The unequal relationship between men who pay for sex and women who sell it is at the heart of this book … Decriminalisation does not stop verbal abuse and physical violence ... but provides legal space in which abuse can happen … By putting equality and human rights at the heart of this vital debate, [Banyard] has done us a tremendous service.” Reviewing it for the Sunday Times, Eleanor Mills was filled with a sense of unease. “Just as we now can’t believe that domestic violence was once condoned, in future years we will look back at the way trafficked women are currently housed in battery-chicken-style mega-brothels in Germany as a similar insult to notions of female equality and human rights … I challenge anyone to read this book and not feel there is something profoundly immoral and wrong about all of this.” But in the Times, Janice Turner found cause for optimism. Banyard “argues the case that prostitution … [is] irreconcilable with human rights”, she wrote. “What shines through this uncompromising book is an optimism about change … the oldest profession can be viewed with new eyes.”