PROVING once again her exceptional, empathetic storytelling process, Kate Atkinson’s latest is a winning combination of clever plotting, spry pacing and an endearing cast of characters, centred around the government’s attempts to cheer up the war-weary nation with the Festival of Britain in 1951.

At the heart of this twisty tale – which involves spies, a stroppy teenager, vile villains and a lovable dog – is dashing, damaged Harry Flynn, a traumatised foreign correspondent who was a POW in Burma. Back in England, he’s reluctantly enrolled in the shambolic push to get the huge festival open to the public – an endeavour that lends itself to much light-heartedness as things, inevitably, go askew in the most spectacular of ways.

RIFFING on the famous first line of Rebecca, Rose Tremain boldly reimagines the role of Mrs Danvers in that enduring classic. Here the housekeeper is Mrs Danowski, a lonely Polish Jew and the much-respected housekeeper of her beloved Manderville Hall, whose life is changed by a secret love affair with Daphne du Maurier.

It’s a charged relationship, as restrained Danni recalls becoming ‘a wild creature of the deep sea’ and Daphne ‘the amorous coral’ as their passion plays out in the boat house. There’s much at stake for Daphne, who is married and has a literary reputation to uphold; for Danni, it’s her heart and her job – as an avaricious niece schemes to inherit the stately home from her faltering uncle.

Melancholy, moving and cinematic – the story is, fittingly, being made into a film directed by Richard Eyre.

Frances Winter won’t stop growing, Her sister is dainty, her mother small, her father is of middling height, but Frances, age 16, is over six feet and seems to add an inch to her measurements with every month that passes.

Goggin’s debut is wonderfully Gothic – her morally upright father is harbouring secret vices, there’s a dubious showman offering a treacherous route to freedom to unhappy Frances, and a clutch of psychics and Pre-Raphaelite artists add to the drama. All the dark, delicious tropes of the genre are present, but Frances’s preoccupations with her body, and her perception of it as something unwieldy and unlovable has contemporary resonance.