The Literary Fiction you need on your shelf this week: Roddy Doyle, Rumaan Alam, Eric

THE WOMEN BEHIND THE DOOR By Roddy Doyle (Jonathan Cape £20, 272pp)

The Woman Behind the Door is available now from The Mail Bookshop

PAULA SPENCER, star of two previous Doyle novels, is now 66. And, as her pal Mary has it, she’s living her best life – her violently abusive husband, Charlo, is long dead, and her alcoholic blackouts a thing of the past.

She has a job, companionship in the form of a man with whom she sometimes shares a bed, and she’s even riding out the Covid storm. But then, as she’s savouring the elation of her first vaccination, her 46-year-old daughter Nicola arrives on her doorstep, having walked out on her own family.

For decades, it was Nicola who mothered the incapacitated Paula; now, she has the opportunity to be a parent at last. 

This is an incredibly affecting third act that brilliantly captures Paula’s internal weather, a light-and-shade of devastation and normality – even, thanks to Mary, hilarity. The past will never be past for Paula, but as the reckonings come, it is beginning to be accommodated at last.

ENTITLEMENT By Rumaan Alam (Bloomsbury £16.99, 288pp) 

AT 33, beautiful Black Manhattanite Brooke is entering her ‘Jesus year’.

And she’s in the business of good works, having been employed by octogenarian white billionaire Asher Jaffee to dispose of his fortune (true altruism? Tax dodge? Whim? All three?) 

But with her proximity to Asher’s fabulous riches, and egged on by his gospel of asking for more, Brooke starts making free with the company credit card and then there’s the real estate she has her eye on… 

Alam is best known for his fantastic, apocalyptic Leave The World Behind (recently made into a rather less fantastic Netflix Show). This is a different beast – an uneasy, intriguing probing of want, need, freedom and race.

Brooke is both an enigma and, in her urgent desire for self-determination, painfully plausible, reacting to life’s inequities in a way that’s as logical as it is outrageous.

WHAT I KNOW ABOUT YOU By Eric Chacour (Gallic Books £9.99, 256pp) 

What I Know About You is available now from the The Mail Bookshop

THE ‘you’ of the title is Tarek, a Cairo-born doctor who, in the 1960s, founds a clinic to tend to slum dwellers.

 Newly married, his future seems bright – but then he meets handsome male prostitute Ali, and a kiss turns his world upside down.

The ‘I’ is Tarek’s teenage son who, some three decades later, sets out to tell the story of the father who fled to Canada before he was born. 

In the first part of the novel, he fills in the silences that surround Tarek to imagine his life; in the second, he enacts his daring plan to track his missing parent down.

Newly translated into English, this international bestseller scooped one of France’s top book prizes in 2023, and deservedly. An absorbing, affecting novel of grief and love, it’s so assured and deftly executed that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut.