In his latest novel, Piers Paul Read has gone the way of Sebastian Faulks with a Great War epic that finds its fragrant heroine straddling (or rather perched aloft) the old world and the new. Alice in Exile, by Piers Paul Read (Phoenix, £6.99, 411pp)
Middle-aged male novelists and romantic heroines can make for a deadly combination. They fall madly in love – Alice bravely ditching convention by agreeing to share his Heal’s bed. No less bravely, Edward introduces Alice to his family (landed aristos), who bridle at her all-too-middle-class credentials.

Alice’s allegiance to suffragist sympathies further alienate her prospective in-laws, a situation made worse when her radicalising father is arrested for publishing a sex manual. Edward buckles under family pressure, withdraws his offer of marriage, and Alice (now pregnant) accepts a job offer from a philandering Russian baron to be governess at his country estate near St Petersburg.Free from the constraints of Edwardian London, both Alice’s life and Read’s novel perk up considerably. Major historical events (the First World War, the Russian Revolution) artfully underpin an ever-increasingly romantic war-time narrative that matches the best of Mary Wesley. That Alice’s lissome beauty somehow remains intact throughout the deprivations of the Bolshevik uprising (while the Baron’s wife loses her hair, sanity and skin tone) is to be expected. A sterling costume drama which might have been a better, and cheaper, bet for television than Dr Zhivago. According to Queeney, Beryl Bainbridge (Abacus, £6.99, 244pp)Streatham and Croydon get an alluring make-over in Beryl Bainbridge’s Booker short-listed novel, though Samuel Johnson and his m?ge emerge with rather more than warts and all.

In the summer of 1766, having finished his dictionary and edition of Shakespeare, Johnson retreated to his bed. To the rescue came Henry and Hester Thrale who whisked him back to their South London home. Told from the point of view of the Thrales’ daughter, “Queeney”, the novel describes the developing relationship between Johnson and Mrs Thrale – as perverse and affectionate as any marriage. Funny, farcical and confusing, Bainbridge’s sensibilities are perfectly in tune with the complex muddle of Georgian London.Hollowpoint, by Rob Reuland (Vintage, £6.99, 273pp)Rob Rueland’s debut thriller is as hard-boiled as you can get. The settings are ugly, the dialogue scary and the characters bleak. Reuland’s narrator is Assistant District Attorney Andrew Giobberti.