Helen Oyeyemi, GingerbreadSeventeen-year-old Perdita, her mother Harriet and grandmother Margot are three generations of women living in west London whose primary inheritance is the lean-year recipe for gingerbread invented by great-great-great-grandma on their father’s side. Perdita has a gluten allergy, discovered when she was six after ingesting too much of the “trick and treat”. As a teenager she is “preoccupied with ephemerality”, oblivious to her peers, and preoccupied with her talking dolls and her mother’s homeland of Druhástrana (described cunningly by Oyeyemi via a Wikipedia entry as “an alleged nation-state of indeterminable geographic location”). An overdose of gingerbread sends her into an eight-day coma. While she recovers, Harriet tells her daughter stories of Druhástrana, starring her childhood friend Gretel. Oyeyemi’s sixth novel sparkles with her sublime inventiveness. (Credit: Riverhead)

Dave Eggers, The ParadeIn Eggers’ spare, allegorical new novel, corporate operatives named Four and Nine land in a nation “recovering from years of civil war, riddled with corruption and burdened now by a new and lawless government.” They fly in under assumed names on a private charter. Their mission: to pave and paint a two-lane highway uniting the rural south with the urban north, in 12 days — in time for a unifying parade starting in the capital and headed by the president, a master of political theatre. Four, on his 63rd assignment, has been held at gunpoint, passed “wells poisoned with corpses” and “missed by minutes the scene of a crucifixion.” Nine is new. His forays break the rules, and force a reckoning, but nothing prepares them for the horror at road’s end. (Credit: Alfred A Knopf)

Maylis de Kerangal, The Cook“Inventive, delicate, unpretentious.” This is the gustatory goal for Mauro, who at 24 is a “self-taught chef from nowhere” offering a singular experience (gnocchi in butter and sage, sea bass with peach) at La Belle Saison. His Paris restaurant with its pocket kitchen and seasonal offerings opens in June 2008, a signal moment in his journey in the world of “fooding.” The mysterious narrator (female, close to Mauro, perhaps in love with him?) adds a layer of intrigue as she describes his beginnings (baking cakes at 10, feeding his buddies through high school, working a summer job in the ‘cold appetisers’ department of an opulent looking brasserie in 2004). Then come the heavy shifts and breakneck pace. As the artist emerges, The Cook intrigues, entices, and ultimately satisfies. Translated from the French by Sam Taylor. (Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)