CPThe Maze by Panos Karnezis (VINTAGE £6.99 (362pp))Imagine the dazed-and-confused episodes from Homer’s Odyssey crossed with the deadpan military comedy of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. Improbable, but this first novel by a Greek-born author has something of that unlikely quality. It’s set in an Anatolian backwater in 1922, as a doomed Greek brigade prepares to scarper. Quietly hilarious, oddly affecting, and written with a fabulous dry wit that announces the maturity of a major new talent. ATLANTIC 15.99 (466pp) £14.99 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

History is coy and hides her essential truths. What historians teach are the summ-ations, the apparent con- clusions and sweeping retrospective pageants.

The beginnings, the illuminations and epiphanies, the chance encounters and abrupt partings that mark the moment in which choices are made remain secret, to be teased out by the tellers of tales. What if history lurks in a poem or a love story, and that which we read as history is (as Francisco Goldman asks) “just a fiction, a story, dressed up as a poem of tragic love and confession? A lie told for the sake of art, but with the consequences of a real lie?” The question lies at the heart of Goldman’s new novel.
The “Divine Husband” is the 19th-century Cuban poet, Jos?arti, hero of the independence war against Spain, a Byronic figure idolised in Central America but unknown in the English-speaking world except as the author of the words of “Guantanamera”. Each is a complete individual, like no other pig.” CHDespite the Falling Snow by Shamim Sarif (REVIEW £7.99 (341pp)) Shamim Sarif’s intense and elegant first novel drew on her South African/Indian roots. This one, flitting between present-day Boston and 1950s Moscow, shows that her cultural compass can stretch even wider, without dulling the delicacy of her gaze. It’s a love story, of course, but one in which secrets and lies loom large. Also, betrayal: the dramatic betrayals of Stalinist Russia and the small betrayals of late middle age Highly readable. Inevitably, the charming heroes of this winning book are porcine: “intelligent, loyal and affectionate.

CHThe Pig Who Sang to the Moon by Jeffrey Masson (VINTAGE £7.99 (285pp))Like Lyall Watson’s revelatory The Whole Hog, this book prompts us to take an informed interest in the fellow creatures we customarily regard as little more than a form of fuel. In his report on “the emotional world of farm animals”, Masson describes how a hen rescued from a factory farm instantly made a “perfectly formed” nest with her disfigured beak and, more remarkably, “derived obvious pleasure” from human company. You’ll learn how, in an outbreak of “penicide” in Thailand, one woman flushed her husband’s penis down the loo. You’ll discover heaps about Victorian anti-masturbation devices.. But maybe you’d prefer a nice cup of tea.