The Literary Fiction that belongs on your bookshelf this week: Elizabeth Strout, Olga

TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout (Viking £16.99, 336pp)  

One is starting to need a guide, in the form perhaps of several family trees, to the increasingly expansive yet interlocked world of Strout’s fiction. 

Tell Me Everything brings together her Lucy Barton novels and her two Olive Kitteridge books, but also the Burgess brothers from her 2013 novel The Burgess Boys. 

Now firmly settled in Crosby, Maine, Lucy is playing confidant to the fabulously waspish Olive (Strout’s greatest creation) who, now 90 and living in a nursing home, is keen for someone to hear her many stories.

At the same time, Bob, a lawyer, has become involved in a local murder case in which a painter is accused of murdering his elderly mother. 

Strout is one of a kind: a novelist whose deceptively simple grainy sentences can contain the deepest truths.

THE EMPUSIUM by Olga Tokarczuk (Fitzcarraldo Editions £12.99, 336pp) 

This new novel by the Polish Nobel prize winner is subtitled ‘A health resort horror story’ – and if that doesn’t make you leap to read it then I’m not sure what will.

A 24-year-old engineer has arrived at a mountainous sanatorium in 1913 in the hope of being cured of TB. 

Instead, he discovers a building infested with terrors: the owner’s wife is found strangled, a life-sized wooden puppet is discovered in the woods, and it becomes clear that patients regularly go missing, only to turn up horribly murdered.

Tokarczuk has a lot of fun with her novel’s pulpy gothic trappings, but as the male patients at the resort debate their largely intolerable opinions, there’s also a much more serious reckoning going on with ideas of gender and 20th century political thought. 

A gleefully mischievous feminist riposte to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

ALL MY PRECIOUS MADNESS by Mark Bowles (Galley Beggar Press £10.99, 276pp)

Independent book presses continue to produce some of the most original fiction, the sort of books most mainstream houses wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

Take this curio: a fabulously spiky, increasingly infuriated stream of consciousness style rant in which our narrator Henry, a disenchanted lecturer, fulminates against anything and everything to do with contemporary life, with particular ire reserved for the jargon heavy witterings of the salesman who haunts the Soho cafe where Henry works.

Henry is a modern anti-hero who despises the low-brow mind set of modern Britain, particularly the abuse of language. He is haunted too by memories of his abusive father.

This strange disruptive novel starts to bear down on the reader with oppressive violence, before breaking free and reaching for the light. There is plenty here that will resonate with anyone who has found themselves mildly irritated by the term ‘selfie sticks’.