Brought up in the Anglo-Welsh borders, Owen Ithell's sense of self is rooted in his visits to his grandparents' farm in the hills. There he is impressed by his grandfather's primitive, cruel relationship with his animals and the land. As an adult he moves to an English city where works as a gardener. He meets Mel and they have children. But following a car accident, in which a daughter dies, he is haunted by suicidal thoughts. In his despair, he abducts his children and walks to the Welsh borders of his childhood. Powerful, richly evocative and perfectly poised between the hope of redemption and the threat of irrevocable tragedy, Landed is Pears' most assured novel to date. Bill Akers

Tim and Jane Farnsworth’s comfortable life is undermined by his peculiar compulsion, at any moment of the day or night, to set out walking for hours until he collapses with exhaustion. He wakes with no idea how he got to where he is, his wife repeatedly has to travel to rescue him, and inevitably this begins to place a strain on their relationship. The medical world has no name for this condition, which, as it worsens and sends him into a psychotic state, is driving the Farnsworths apart, emotionally as well as physically. In this intriguing follow-up to his debut novel Then we Came to the End, Ferris uses language that is as exact and poetic as his premise is fantastic. Tom Nissley

Little Hands Clapping

Dan Rhodes
(Canongate)

In a room above a bizarre German museum, and far from the prying eyes of strangers, lives the Old Man. Caretaker of the museum by day, by night he enjoys the sound of silence, broken by the occasional crunch of a spider between his blackened teeth. Little Hands Clapping - a grotesquely amusing story about suicide - brings together the Old Man with the respectable Doctor Ernst Frohlicher, his greedy dog Hans and a cast of grotesque and hilarious townsfolk, all of whose lives are thrown together as the town uncovers a crime so outrageous that it will shock the world. From its sinister opening to its explosive denouement, Little Hands Clapping blends lavishly entertaining storytelling with Rhodes's macabre imagination, entrancing originality and magical touch. Bill Akers

Fever of the Bone

Val McDermid
(Sphere)

In this superb literary thriller, McDermid shows why she is this year’s winner of the Cartier Diamond Dagger award as her criminal profiler Tony Hill meets his most twisted adversary - a killer with a shopping list of victims, unmoved by youth and innocence and driven by perverted desires. The murder and mutilation of teenager Jennifer Maidment is horrific enough on its own. But it's not long before Hill realises it's just the start of a brutal campaign that's targeting an apparently unconnected group of young people. Wire in the Blood is a chilling examination of the dangers of social networking sites in which Hill, struggling with the newly-awakened ghosts of his own past and desperate for distraction in his work, battles to find the answers in his most testing investigation yet. Ralph Fields

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