Super theories

Alfred Hickling, Olivia Laing and Joanna Hines on Rosa | In the Wake | Olivia Laing | Instruction Manual for Swallowing | The People of Paper | Strangers

Rosa, by Jonathan Rabb (Halban, £10.99)

Rosa Luxemburg, the figurehead of the failed German workers' revolution, was assassinated by rightwing militia on January 15 1919, though the body remained missing for four months until it was found floating in a canal. What happened in the intervening weeks is anyone's guess; and here is Jonathan Rabb's "novel-length conspiracy theory about serial killings and police corruption in which all roads lead to Rosa". Luxemburg's body is found to have been disfigured with a mysterious pattern of knife markings and slathered with an unguent that prevents decomposition. It is Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner's job to determine whether this is the work of a psychotic "chisel murderer" terrorising Berlin, or an elaborate plot with its roots in the anti-semitic rightwing movement developing in Bavaria. Rabb's frenzied plotting can be difficult to follow, but he has fun incorporating the celebrity figures of postwar Berlin - the director of the scientific institute is a man with "an unruly moustache and basset hound eyes" who has come up with a theory variously described as either ludicrous or genius. You don't need to be Einstein to work out who it is.
Alfred Hickling

In the Wake, by Per Petterson, translated by Anne Born (Vintage, £7.99)

Norwegian divorcee Arvid has lost most of his family in a ferry disaster. Then his one surviving brother attempts suicide. Consequently Arvid spends much of the novel sitting in hospitals feeling wretchedly sorry for himself, while reflecting on the failure of his literary career: "I remember reading Keats and Shelley and dreaming of publishing a book that would be everyone's mirror ... After that I would just disappear, become one of the young dead and thus immortal, but now I am one of the middle aged and forgotten." He finds some solace in the company of fellow loners: a nurse and single mother he sporadically sleeps with without learning her name, and a Kurdish refugee in the flat upstairs whose only words of Norwegian are "hi" , "thanks" and "problem". Petterson's book is an intense, elegantly modulated exposition of grief, though Arvid's determination to be miserable can be a bit much: "I like airports, I like big bridge spans and concrete constructions, I can drive long diversions to see a power station." Maybe living in one of the cleanest, greenest countries in the world means that Norwegians crave a little ugliness in their lives.

Instruction Manual for Swallowing, by Adam Marek (Comma Press, £7.95)

There's a transgressive thrill to Adam Marek's debut collection of short stories that's not simply a result of the potency of the subject matter, though male rape, suicide and cannibalism all get an outing. Marek is interested in boundaries and their penetration - whether it's a boy's foot pierced by a fork or a man swallowing codeine tablets to enter his own subconscious. The stories take in robotic wasps, lovesick centipedes and a grotesquely multiple pregnancy, a relentless round of oddities that would pall were it not for Marek's knack of melding the absurd with the prosaic to create tales as playful and emotionally resonant as they are disturbing. Couples row in the face of giant lizards, insects mourn lost wives and the town of Biggleswade is the setting for a futuristic realm of the flesh-eating undead. Most delightful of all is the gleeful carnage of "A Gilbert and George Talibanimation", in which a young man experiences a moment of epiphany with his estranged girlfriend at Tate Modern amid an influx of giant, phallus-wielding simulacra of the artists Gilbert and George, hell-bent on destroying the suddenly murderous Turbine Hall slides.
Olivia Laing

The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia (Bloomsbury, £7.99)

The carnation-pickers of El Monte are at war, led by Federico de Fe, an adult bed-wetter who has discovered the cure for sadness. Their weaponry consists of lead shells stolen from mechanical tortoises, and their enemy is none other than the author himself. No longer will they allow their most private moments of lovemaking and grief to be observed, particularly not by an embittered novelist who's barely taller than Napoleon and just as unsuccessful in love. The only character resistant to Plascencia's eavesdropping is the Baby Nostradamus, a brain-damaged infant with the gift of prophecy, whose contributions to the text are shrouded in black ink that renders them unreadable. As the rebellion against omniscient narration gathers pace, order gives way to a Babel of voices, each determined to assert their own story and expose the lies that Plascencia has told. This self-conscious unpicking of the conventions of fiction is not new, but Plascencia takes on the task with such whimsical relish that it is impossible not to warm to his venture, particularly since he has punctured any tendencies towards pomposity by inking his self-portrait in so determinedly unflattering a light.

Strangers, by Carla Banks (Harper, £6.99)

An innocent man is publicly beheaded in as-Sa'ah Square, commonly known as "Chop Chop Square", in Riyadh; a young woman, bruised before drowning, is pulled from the Thames. Both deaths are linked somehow to Joe Massey, a pathologist, who marries Roisin Gardner after a brief romance and travels with her to Saudi Arabia. Occasionally Massey and the equally enigmatic Damien O'Neill hover dangerously close to Mills and Boon heroes, but once in Saudi the action picks up. Carla Banks skilfully evokes the mixture of bewilderment and fear of expats living in a desert kingdom where "justice" is swift and apparently arbitrary and where even highly educated women often subscribe to a code that seems medieval to westerners. The claustrophobia of women's lives in Riyadh adds to the mounting tension; the boredom of the European "Stepford wives", confined to their artificial compounds, is mirrored by the fantasy of the fabulously luxurious shopping mall where Muslim women can wear western clothes and enjoy the illusion of freedom. A complex and satisfying thriller, set against a backdrop of exotic nightmare.
Joanna Hines