The Retreat Alison Moore Salt £9.99

Moore, previously shortlisted for the Booker Prize, specialises in quietly unsettling short novels about shut-in lives full of longing. Her new book follows Sandra, a middle-aged receptionist and would-be painter who visits an artists’ retreat only for her ambitions to wilt under the backbiting of fellow residents. While narrative tension comes mainly from her social discomfort, there’s mystery, too, thanks to a secondary thread about an aspiring novelist in search of creative solitude. Poignant and darkly comic.