Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks <br></br>Blue Diary, by Alice Hoffman <br></br>Days Like Today, by Rachel Ingalls <br></br>Crawling at Night, by Nani Power

Paperbacks

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks (Fourth Estate, £6.99, 310pp)

The smell of rotting apples was the first harbinger of plague, followed by the telltale ring of roses under the skin, and a boil behind the head the size of a newborn piglet. That is what lay in store for the inhabitants of the Derbyshire village of Eyam when, in 1665, at the first sign of the pestilence, they took the brave – some would say foolhardy – decision to cut themselves off from the outside world. Within a year, over half of the village's population had perished.

No stranger to catastrophic subject matter, the Wall Street Journal war correspondent Geraldine Brooks has taken the true story of Eyam as the inspiration for her first novel, narrated by an invented servant girl, Anna Frith. The progress of the plague takes a back seat to a triangular love story between Anna, the rector and his wife, Elinor. During Eyam's quarantine, the three turn to witchcraft, flagellantism and small-time crookery, while Anna, a tad anachronistically, discovers feminism and the joys of gardening.

The only disappointment in this lyrically written and emotionally engaging novel is in its evocation of the Derbyshire countryside. For all its heathery dells and lowering skies, you would be hard-pressed to say whether Brooks's bucolic dispatches were describing Bakewell or Beirut.

Blue Diary, by Alice Hoffman (Vintage, £6.99, 303pp)

Often compared to the novels of Anne Tyler, Alice Hoffman's tales of American suburbia are in fact much creepier. Whatever the seeming good fortune of her characters, tragedy is always just a phone call away. Hoffman's 15th novel opens on just such an ambivalent note. Ethan, a fireman and pillar of the community, and Jorie have been happily married for 10 years. Then comes the knock at the door and a warrant for his arrest. A writer who taps into our everyday fear of accident, Hoffman tells us how to behave "when everything too terrible to imagine actually happens."

Days Like Today, by Rachel Ingalls (Faber & Faber, £7.99, 289pp)

What do you do when your war-correspondent husband starts to sleep with a pretty young woman on his production team? Steal his good-luck charms and make sure you're the first visitor to his hospital bed. In five fuss-free short stories, Rachel Ingalls wrestles with some age-old emotions – or, as one character puts it, "love, hatred, desire, jealousy. Greed. Fear. Everything." Battlefields, both military and domestic, are a mainstay of the stories, and Ingalls treats us to an intelligent overview of the hidden agendas of each of the combatants.

Crawling at Night, by Nani Power (Vintage, £6.99, 234pp)

Fans of tuna fish may do well to think twice before launching into this neon-lit novel about life in a New York sushi bar. Nani Power's distinctive début tells the story of a slow-burning affair between a lonely sushi chef and an alcoholic waitress. Power succeeds in describing a very un-American courtship. But best of all is her description of life in a sushi restaurant – a place where New Yorkers rub their chopsticks together in glee and drown their fish in oceans of soy sauce. Much more than the gimmicky fast-food package you may have suspected.