Bollen opens this thriller, set on the Greek island of Patmos, with an explosion ripping through the outdoor patio of Nikos Taverna, killing a young American tourist, and he never slows down. The narrator for most of the book is Ian, who is down on his luck and running away from the tense aftermath of his father's death. He travels to Patmos to visit his boyhood friend Charlie, who offers him a job with his new charter yacht business. But Charlie's life as the son of a wealthy Greek-Cypriot businessman is filed with unexpected dangers. And the game they played together when they were young – in which a group of masked gunmen bursts into the room and starts shooting – begins to seem all too real. Intellectually intriguing and eerily timely. (Credit: Harper)

Laird's intimate and searing look at the aftereffects of violent conflict and religious fanaticism, revolves around two sisters facing personal crises. Liz, a New York-based academic, is preparing to travel to the rainforest of Papua New Guinea to make a BBC documentary about Belef, the charismatic woman leader of a cargo cult. But first she's back in her hometown of Ballyglass in Northern Ireland, for her sister Alison's second wedding. Before the honeymoon begins a newspaper headline reveals Alison's new husband's past as a member of the Ulster Freedom Fighters involved in a pub massacre. And now she is morally implicated. Half a globe away, Liz is drawn into Belef's rituals, with tragic consequences. Finely etched, impeccably structured, Modern Gods has the enduring echoes of a classic. (Credit: Viking)

3. Victoria Redel, Before Everything

Redel's new novel brings to mind Virginia Woolf's The Waves, with its chorus of distinctive voices sharing private perceptions along with their sustained collective experience. Five girls who dubbed themselves "the old friends" in sixth grade have carried their connection forward through decades, sharing tragedies and triumphs. In March 2013 they gather as Anna, the sparkplug of the group, decides to discontinue her cancer treatment after four remissions. She wants to say her goodbyes. In lyrical prose, Redel interweaves Anna's final days with echoes of the past – the day Helen accompanied a teenaged Anna to her abortion, the day of Ming's daughter Lily's brain surgery, the weddings, the divorces. The endings. "This, Helen thought, this is what Anna will do. She will teach us all how to do this thing we don't know how to do." (Credit: Viking)

4. Colin Harrison, You Belong to Me

Harrison's encyclopedic knowledge of New York, his noirish genius and his storytelling chops are on fine display in this new thriller about immigration lawyer Paul Reeves and the couple who live across the hall, a blonde American beauty named Jennifer and her wealthy Iranian-American husband Ahmed. Reeves is twice divorced and focused mostly on his passion for old maps of New York, which he stores in his apartment and his family home in Brooklyn. Jennifer tags along with him to Christie's one day while Ahmed is out of the country on business, and Reeves witnesses her surprise at spotting a blond man in desert-coloured soldier's fatigues staring at her. She leaves with the man. And so begins the unwinding of a marriage, with tragic consequences for the men in Jennifer's life. (Credit: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

5. Julia Fierro, The Gypsy Moth Summer

In June 1992, gypsy moths invaded Avalon Island, caterpillars stripping trees, covering houses and pavements, and raining down upon the residents. This is the summer, writes Fierro in her luminous second novel, when Leslie Day Marshall, "golden-haired prodigal daughter, returns with her black husband and brown children to claim her seat as First Lady." Leslie's son Brooks falls in love with Avalon's Maddie, the daughter of a wealthy mother and a working-class father. Their Romeo and Juliet story plays out as Grudder Aviation, the island's major employer, is blamed for a cluster of insidious cancers and for dozens of women, including Leslie, suffering repeated miscarriages. Fierro laces her lyrical tale of revenge and rebellion with gritty details, mythic settings and a nuanced sense of how class and racial divisions shape us. (Credit: St. Martins)

6. Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

"Salmon-grief" echoes throughout the pages of this sardonic, raw and moving memoir from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Wild salmon provided physical and spiritual sustenance for the Interior Salish – Alexie's Native American people – for thousands of years. In 1938, five years after the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, they were gone. Alexie's Spokane mother and Coeur d'Alene father, fluent Salish speakers, were the first generation to live entirely without wild salmon. "Poverty was our spirit animal", he writes of growing up on the Spokane reservation. (Credit: Little, Brown)

7. Gail Godwin, Grief Cottage

Marcus is 11 when his mother dies; he never knew his father. Soon he's living with his mother's eccentric aunt Charlotte in her South Carolina beach cottage. She's painting a house built in 1804 dubbed the Grief Cottage after a family died there during Hurricane Hazel. That summer Marcus becomes himself, with the help of Charlotte, who drinks wine throughout the day in her painting studio and her empathetic friend Lachicotte Hayes. Marcus's grief and confusion are salved by the ocean, the sea turtles nesting nearby, and the secrets he learns about his family. But under the surface he's floundering. Soon he is obsessed with a mysterious boy he secretly visits daily at Grief Cottage. (Credit: Bloomsbury)

8. Lee Daniel Kravetz, Strange Contagion

Kravetz moved to Palo Alto, California in 2009. His wife had just taken a job at Google and was expecting their first child. Within months, five local high school students died by suicide on the train tracks near his apartment. Why "These kids are driven," one teacher tells him. This affluent small town at the center of Silicon Valley, Kravetz writes, is huge in terms of innovation and scaling of new ideas – and stress upon its young. Kravetz gathers research on social contagions – the ways in which others influence our lives by catchable thoughts, emotions and behaviours. He speaks with the school's principal and other community members struggling to comfort the survivors and stop the deaths. Yet in 2014 another suicide cluster emerges. A chilling and important look at the social contagions that threaten us. (Credit: Harper)

9. Becky Aikman, Off the Cliff

It's been over 25 years since the release of Thelma and Louise, the ground-breaking female buddy film hailed for its comedy, stark visual effects and shocking, off-the-cliff ending. Drawing upon some 130 interviews, Aikman tracks the film from 1987, when Callie Khouri from Paducah, Kentucky, a line producer on music videos, concocts the script, to Oscar night 1992, when six nominations yield Khouri an Academy Award. She weaves the film into Hollywood history, and gives a delicious blow-by-blow account, including Ridley Scott's efforts to find the location for that ending, and the early casting of Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer (in the roles that went to Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon), and Billy Baldwin as the sexy hitchhiker instead of a young newcomer named Brad Pitt. (Credit: Penguin Press)