Her retreat from the real world is her aunt’s house in Norfolk, home to her glamorous cousins and scene of her mother’s accident. Tyler’s narrative voice is more melancholy than in previous novels, but her seamless depiction of unfolding lives is as deft as ever. Her innocents are trapped as much by bad timing as one another. EHWish I May by Justine Picardie (PICADOR £6.99 (326pp)) The heroine of Picardie’s fiction debut, single mother Kate Linden, is struggling to come to terms with her mother’s untimely death. She lives in north London with her eight-year-old son, and earns a living writing about the “semiotics of lipstick” for a glossy magazine. Meanwhile, the emotionally illiterate Michael wonders if it’s possible “to dislike your own wife”. It soon becomes apparent that marriage is more complicated than falling in love.

Pauline’s frustrations are channelled into interior design – ash-blond wood and “boomerang” shaped mirrors – and, later, a flirtation with a divorced man. He bandages her cuts and the course of their future lives is sealed. From wartime bride to bored housewife, Pauline’s post-war life is lived out in a shiny housing development in Baltimore County. Her latest novel relates the most frustrating scenario of all: a union in which two partners constantly collide, but not dramatically enough to call it a day.

As with many of their generation, Michael and Pauline’s marriage is the result of a wartime romance. Michael is stacking bars of soap when he meets Pauline – brought into his family’s grocery store after she falls from a streetcar during a military parade. The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (PIMLICO £8.99 (316pp))
Over the course of her writing career, Tyler has followed the well-worn grooves of several Baltimore marriages. Over the course of her writing career, Tyler has followed the well-worn grooves of several Baltimore marriages. All three writers have certainly delivered Olympic-standard thrillers.