The MUST READ fiction out now in paperback: Helle & Death by Oskar Jensen, The Djinn

HELLE & DEATH by Oskar Jensen (Viper £9.99, 400pp)

TEN years after they met at university, a group of old friends is summoned to a house party at a remote Northumbrian castle.

At university, Danish art historian Torben Helle cordially disliked their host, Anthony Dodd. But he can’t resist the reclusive tech entrepreneur’s invitation to reconnect with his contemporaries. 

There is a reason beyond mere nostalgia why Anthony has invited his friends to this reunion, but before he reveals what it is, they all have to hand over their mobile phones – and then the snow sets in.

Marooned in the castle, they discover one of their number dead, apparently by suicide. Or is it? Clues seem to suggest something even more violent.

Oskar Jensen’s clever and engaging début is an affectionate homage to classic murder mysteries.

THE DJINN WAITS A HUNDRED YEARS by Shubnum Khan (Magpie £9.99, 320pp)

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years is available now from the Mail Bookshop 

SANA Malek is only 15, but her life is haunted by loss. Her mother died when she was 11, and her sister, a conjoined twin who died after the pair were separated, is a spiteful, ghostly presence.

When Sana’s father decides that moving house is the best way to leave painful thoughts behind, the place he chooses as their new home is Akbar Manzil – once the grandest house on the east coast of South Africa, but now a crumbling mansion, filled with the unhappy memories of the quarrelsome old people who live there.

As she begins to learn her fellow residents’ stories, Sana explores the mansion’s dusty attics, finding long-lost diaries that tell an extraordinary love story. Shubnam Khan’s first novel is a seductive tale of tragedy and redemption.

LIGHT OVER LISKEARD by Louis de Bernières (Vintage £9.99, 304pp)

ARTHUR, or ‘Q’, as his colleagues call him, is a quantum cryptographer and a Government adviser who thinks of himself as ‘an incurable stranger’. 

He has always had the feeling that one day he would be at the forefront of a new beginning. 

So when a mysterious poet turns up at his door and prophecies the end of the world in verse, Q recognises that his moment has come, and decamps to Bodmin Moor in Cornwall to build a refuge for his wife and children from the looming threat of AI.

On his way to view an abandoned farmhouse, he encounters a curious and mythical group of people who will become his neighbours and help him to rebuild, not just his dilapidated home, but his relationships and his ability to love