In brief: Magpie Lane; I Want You to Know We're Still Here; The Language of Birds – reviews

A child goes missing from an Oxford college, a daughter uncovers a family secret about the Holocaust and the Lord Lucan scandal gets a vibrant rewrite

Magpie Lane

Lucy Atkins

Quercus, £16.99, pp368

Nick is newly appointed as master of an Oxford college. Self-regarding to the point of narcissism, he lives in the master’s lodgings with his near-mute daughter, Felicity, and his beautiful but vacuous second wife, Mariah. Felicity’s Scottish nanny, Dee, seems to build a rapport with her young charge; but when Felicity goes missing, it is Dee to whom the police come for answers. Tense, perceptive and meticulously plotted, Magpie Lane is an intelligent exploration of privilege, belonging, grief and parental responsibility.

I Want You to Know We’re Still Here: My Family, the Holocaust and My Search for the Truth

Esther Safran Foer

HQ, £16.99, pp384

When Esther Safran Foer (mother of novelist Jonathan) discovered that her father had lost his first wife and daughter in the Holocaust, it came as a shock: she didn’t know he’d had another family, nor she a half-sister. Embarking on a quest to uncover the precise fate of her sister and understand more about her now deceased father, her research takes her from archives and DNA labs to her grandparents’ village in Ukraine in this moving and well-researched memoir.

The Language of Birds

Jill Dawson

Hodder & Stoughton, £8.99, pp272 (paperback)

Taking inspiration from the Lord Lucan affair, Dawson puts the victim front and centre in her latest novel. Mandy River arrives from an impoverished and dysfunctional family in the Fens to care for the two children of Lady Katherine Morven, recently estranged from her violent husband. Where Mandy is a vibrant and compelling literary creation, full of verve, determination and warmth, her best friend and co-narrator Rosemary is unreliable and self-indulgent. Dawson tackles themes of class, culpability, sex and violence in a powerful and affecting novel.

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