Tommy Carr was a kind man; Eve had been able to tell that after half an hour of knowing him. There had never been a day when he had not shown her some small kindness. The birth of a daughter, Jeannie Eliza, crowns the young couple's happiness—just as her shockingly early death casts them low. But they do not need to talk about Jeannie because she remains with them, and their love does not change. In some ways it is no wonder that one of them falls ill, for grief takes its toll, and one Christmas even Eve's sister Miriam is remarking that Tommy looks unwell. But what happens next is entirely unexpected, not least for the kind man.

Charles Redfern is in a coma. As he lies motionless in hospital, his wife Anne and daughter Charlotte are forced to come together to confront their relationships with him—and with each other. As the full truth of Charles's hold over them emerges into the light, both women must come to terms with the choices they have made, and the uncertainty of a future without the figure that has dominated them for so long.

Elizabeth Day's debut novel speaks beautifully and frankly about the banal horror of fractured relationships and the uncomfortable truths behind smiling family photographs. Poetic, absorbing and deeply moving, Scissors, Paper, Stone is a story of damage, survival and restoration, and of the powerful ties that bind us together.

Elizabeth Day is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph and other publications, and who is now a feature writer for the Observer. She grew up in Northern Ireland and graduated with a double first in History from Cambridge. She lives in London.

Following on from the success of her first book, Auschwitz, Angela Morgan Cutler offers us another work that defies easy definition or assignment to a fixed genre. The Letter takes the form of a reply to the anonymous author of a threat letter that was sent to the narrator's husband, En. Instead of the natural response, to freeze or lose language in reaction to such a threat, the book releases a voice that faces the anonymous other who wrote it: a continuous, digressive reply that winds its way through daily observations, reminiscences and reflections that succeed in creating a distance from the potential violence imposed on the family.

The Letter is also an affirmation of home and of the restorative power of storytelling as the book flips between the UK—in the days and weeks that follow the arrival of the letter, with all the paranoia and imaginative leaps that fear evokes—and Spain, months later, when the threat begins to subside. Interspersed throughout the text are accounts of other people's stories—examples of written threats they too have received—and interviews with others caught up in the event: family, friends, a police officer, a postman, a counsellor; all sharing their own perspectives on the process of being threatened, bullied, or stalked. The Letter is a response that can never be sent to a written threat for which there is no return address. And yet, the narrator's reply to the unknown author of the threat remains as a powerful trace of the experience, and a testament to so many stories left untold.

The biography of Lady Caroline Blackwood includes tumultuous, highly public marriages to artist Lucian Freud and poet Robert Lowell, a reputation for eccentricity, and frequent flares of panic. At the same time, she left a body of work marked by intelligent, commanding writing that displays a singular wit and keen appreciation for the absurd. Never Breathe a Word calls attention to Blackwood's mastery, presenting a series of acclaimed short stories, both fictional and autobiographical. Selections span the entirety of her career, from her first book, For All That I Found There, to Good Night Sweet Ladies, one of her last before her death at age 64. The pieces of fiction alternate between tragic and artfully mundane, yet always share Blackwood's characteristic frankness and black humor. Three previously unpublished stories are included, featuring some of her most sympathetic heroines. Her nonfiction comprises eight evocative vignettes taken directly from her own life and set in narrative form.

Beautiful, brazen, and living in "grand squalor" among ashtrays and empty liquor bottles, Blackwood died in 1996 in Manhattan's Mayfair Hotel. She left behind a rare literary legacy—one that testifies to our shared struggles, and to the threadbare connection between art and life.