Paperbacks: Fingersmith<br></br>The Pretender<br></br>The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W<br></br>Buddha Da by Anne Donovan

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (Virago, £7.99, 548pp)

The "lesbo Victorian romp" that missed last year's Man Booker and Orange prizes by a whisker, Sarah Waters's popular novel pastiched everyone's favourite notions of 19th-century melodrama. Completing a quasi-trilogy which began with Tipping the Velvet (1998), Fingersmith once more evokes the dimly lit parlours of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and introduces explicit sex into an already heady equation. The story's young narrator, Sue Trinder, is a Dickensian-style foundling. Brought up in a Fagin-like den, she thieves for a living under the auspices of Mrs Sucksby (who "farms" babies in an upstairs room) and Mr Ibbs, a locksmith and expert in scams. It's another regular visitor to the household, Richard Rivers – aka "Gentleman" – who enlists Sue's help in the most audacious scam to date, which involves marrying himself off to a rich heiress, Maud Lilly, and carting her off to a madhouse.

Posing as a lady's maid, Sue travels to Maud's dark mansion. Here she almost scuppers proceedings by forming an intimate attachment to the child-woman she's been sent to betray. The plot becomes ever more gothic as this three-tier novel teeters towards some thrillingly unexpected revelations. As in Waters's previous novels, a lesbian awakening lies at the book's emotional heart, though this is only part of the story. In this startling pea-souper that re-imagines the scenery of some of English lit's spookier landscapes, Waters names the acts and sensations that the Victorians themselves so successfully hinted at.

The Pretender by Jane Stevenson (Vintage, £6.99, 304pp)

Jane Stevenson has a lot of ground to cover in the second volume of her emergent 17th-century trilogy, and does it with remarkable lightness of touch. While Astraea told the story of an illicit affair between Elizabeth of Bohemia, James I's daughter, and her African physician, this latest instalment follows the fate of their illegitimate son, Balthasar van Overmeer. Stevenson paints a vivid portrait of domestic and social life in a 17th-century slave trade colony, and still manages to get Balthasar from Holland to Barbados and back in time to befriend Aphra Benn.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W by Gabriel Brownstein (Bloomsbury, £9.99, 223pp)

Drawing on a device used by several New York writers, this debut story collection is set around the eccentric inhabitants of an Upper West Side building. On the roof-tops overlooking Central Park, a father fixes wings to his son and pushes him over the edge, while in 7E a lawyer named Zauberman spies on his estranged wife and their daughter. In Apt. 3W a young mother gives birth to a "gray-bearded" old man, who ages in reverse. Scott Fitzgerald, Hawthorne and Kafka can take the blame for some of the more unsettling fantasies, though some are plainly the author's own.

Buddha Da by Anne Donovan (Canongate, £9.99, 330pp)

Anne Donovan's sparkling collection Hieroglyphics and Other Stories was written almost entirely in Scots, and it was possible to read each story half aloud. A novel in dialect sounds more daunting, though the words start to sing off the page. Donovan's debut novel is about a family in crisis, but one triggered by the most unlikely passion. Anne Marie's dad is a Glaswegian decorator who will do anything for a laugh – "Ma da's a nutter. Radio Rental" – but whose decision to take up meditation at the local Buddhist centre triggers a rift with his wife. A delightfully deadpan look at what happens when one family member decides that he's unlocked the secret of the universe.

How the Universe Got its Spots by Janna Levin (Phoenix, £7.99, 240pp)

Last year saw a meagre haul of original pop-science books, but this one shone amid the gloom with a planetary radiance. Janna Levin is a first-rate US cosmologist based at Cambridge. So far, so orthodox. But her book is something else entirely: almost the Fever Pitch of astrophysics, it takes the form of a two-year diary in which the hip, young scientist links the weirdness and wonder of cutting-edge ideas about the universe with gritty urban life in Cambridge and London. Mind-stretching conundra of space and time illuminate the bleak streets of Hackney.