What makes a good story for you? For me, it is all about life and death, about birth and tears, about the stuffing makes up human experience. I feel  short hanged if I leave a cinema without having laughed, or cried,  or both. I remember reading Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You one Christmas Eve, tear s streaming down my face. I was sad, but I was also content because that book had transported me, because I was living a fresh human experience through the written word. An in many ways, that is what I have just experienced while reading Life and Other Near-Death Experiences by Camille Pagan.

This is the story of a young woman hit by a double blow. Everything that she takes for granted – her relationship, her health – suddenly shifts, and she does what many of us might do in the circumstances. She takes off. Fortunately for Libby she is in a fictional world where, when she runs away to spend a month of a beach she meets a supportive older woman and an attractive pilot! Her time is full of ups and downs but by the end she is coming to terms with her changed life and ready to take on the challenges it poses.

I read this straight through on a two hour train journey, so it is a fairly quick read, but a good one. Life and Other Near-Death Experiences costs from £3.99 on Kindle and is out on 1 November.

Sometimes books don’t make sense until right at the end. Satin Island is one where I didn’t get it until I reached the acknowledgements!

Tom McCarthy explains that he wrote this book during a residency which, ‘I spent projecting images of oil spills onto huge white walls and gazing at them for days on end.’ It all begins to make sense …

Satin Island is told by U, a male anthropologist working for a big corporation. He is working on a project, the Koob-Sassen project, which remains opaque throughout the book as to intest and purpose, opaque to U as well as the reader.

McCarthy uses images of oil spills and stories of sabotaged parachutists from news stories in this novel, all as part of U’s ethnographic work. U tries to write a book, and fails, instead coating his walls with images from the news stories and delivering the ideas he derives from these as his contribution towards the project. He feels like he has failed, but his contribution is eventually received with accolades. And we are still unclear what he has contributed to.

In some ways, as I neared the end of this book, it made me think of Don De Lillo’s Cosmopolis. Both books submerge themselves under the surface of the corporate world,but De Lillo goes deeper, faster, and his world is more insane. I loved McCarthy’s Remainder, where you get sucked into one man’s world, sucked so deeply that you don’t realise just how insane it is until right at the end. Satin Island doesnn’t work so well for me, perhaps because U is less compelling: it is hard to write a persuasive corporate drone even if he is a drone with self-knowledge. His relationship with his girlfriend Madison seems bland and unfulfilling for him, which again makes it harder to care. This book works as an intelligent and intellectual analysis of the futility of the corporate world, but if you want a good read and a great introduction to McCarthy, try  Remainder.

I’ve just read these two books and I think between them they do a great job of examining the challenges that becoming a mother places on self and identity. In The Other Side of the World Charlotte struggles to reconnect with the woman she was before children, and to find the time and energy to paint. Her husband, Henry, cannot face the thought of another English winter. Set in the 1960s, Charlotte is strangely contemporary. She is a painter until she becomes a mother, twice in quick succession. The uprooting she experiences as the family emigrates echoes the way in which she herself has been uprooted. This is an atmospheric story about travelling to the other side of the world in the 60s. The writing conveys the changing identity of becoming a new mother, losing yourself and finding your changed self. The scenery is vivid and Bishop does a good job of sharing both how the male and female lead characters feel. A good read, packed with emotion, the ending challenges every mother who has ever felt that her role is too much.

The Crossing is a strange book – but well worth a read. It asks questions about identity and motherhood and running away.  The writing, the language is restrained, and some part of it seems very male as it describes Tim and Maud’s growing relationship, and the birth of their daughter Zoe. In other ways the writing reflects Maud’s character: she is presented as a career woman, a woman who is attractive without knowing it, and ultimately it questions Maud’s role and ability as a mother.

Maud’s love of sailing drives the book. Along with her career as a research scientist, sailing seems the closest she can come to have a passion, and Miller’s book really took off as I read Maud’s struggles with a storm at sea. Like The Other Side of the World, there is ambiguity in the end. Maud is no longer the same person, no longer in the place where she started. Both books acknowledge that in becoming a mother one is no longer the same. And both expose the uncertainty in becoming someone new.

I’m never going on a submarine. I mean, it’s not like it was on my bucket list, but now I’ve read JS Law’s thriller in which he conveys the close quarters and claustrophobic atmosphere so well, I’m steering clear.

Tenacity is Law’s debut novel, and it tells the story of female naval investigator Danielle Lewis, known as Dan, as she tries to untangle the suicide of ‘Whisky’ Walker on board the HMS Tenacity just days after his wife Cheryl has been attacked and killed. I downloaded the book (out now in eBook, November in hardback) after meeting James Law at the Festival of Writing where he was running a session on dialogue.

Law’s story is impressive in itself: he has risen through the ranks of the Royal Navy, starting as an apprentice and spending the latter half of his career in the submarine service. He brings his experience to this book in a positive way – plenty of authentic detail, not too much explanation for the uninitiated. I think one of the strongest points of this book is the atmosphere: Lewis’s time on a submarine is critical to untangling the plot. She is surrounded by hostile men, in a community that protects its own, against a backdrop of a hostile environment, metal walls lines with pipes, while her bunk is amongst the bombs. In that setting the whispers and suppressed violence turn into outright attacks. Lewis wraps up the case, as required by fictional detectives, but many threads are left open, and I’ll be watching out for the next in the series where Danielle Lewis moves away from the submarine setting.

Tenacity costs from £6.49 for the eBook at time of writing.