A Possible Life, by Sebastian Faulks. Vintage , £7.99

Faulks’s new work is made up of two novellas, and three short stories. Their settings include a 21st-century laboratory, a Victorian workhouse and a 1970s recording studio.

Each story shows off his narrative gifts, but each feels unusually compressed. This is particularly true of the opener, “A Different Man” – the grim tale of a cricket-loving officer forced to shovel body parts in a Nazi camp. These semi-interlocking stories illustrate just how “atomic” reverberations continue to shudder down the years: “I think we’re all in this thing, like it or not, for ever.”