The Pilgrimage By John Broderick Pushkin Press, £12.99Frank O’Connor likened the world of the 19th-century novel to life in Irish provincial towns, where “Madame Bovary lived across the way”. This is an apt frame for long-overlooked writer John Broderick’s debut, banned on publication in 1961 for its blunt depiction of adultery and queerness in Irish life. The book’s protagonist, Julia Glynn, is unhappily married to an ailing older man and entangled in an empty affair with his nephew. When she receives an anonymous letter detailing the trysts, more secrets than her own begin to unravel. The Pilgrimage is a bleakly comic and often cruel evocation of a repressive Ireland; Broderick’s tight prose is as effective in illuminating the “shoddy brilliance” of O’Connell Street as it is in exposing the narrow-mindedness of the emergent post-Treaty middle class.Stalin’s ApostlesBy Antonia Senior Hodder & Stoughton £25This riveting and informative book tells the story of the Cambridge Five, from their heady student days as idealistic young Marxists to their double lives as Soviet agents at the heart of Britain’s elite institutions. Senior, a book critic at The Times, moves beyond the well-known story of how privileged young men came to betray their country and highlights the role of intelligence in Stalin’s expansionist ambitions. The book effectively illustrates how treachery from within the British “chapocracy” shaped the fate of nations and the lives of countless people from Tallinn to Tirana. Stalin’s Apostles is a spy thriller, replete with vividly drawn anecdotes of smuggled microfilm and clandestine meetings on park benches. But it is also a fascinating account of the centrality of individuals, ideas and espionage in mid-20th-century European history. The Asset Class By Hettie O’Brien Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25Hettie O’Brien’s astonishing book tells the story of how a new form of debt-fuelled deal, the leveraged buyout, enabled a small group of firms to own vast swathes of the world around us. The Asset Class traces the history of private equity, from a philosophy which cast profit-maximising dealmakers as the saviours of overly bureaucratic economies, to a ubiquitous feature of contemporary capitalism that has swallowed up housing, care homes and hospitals. This highly readable book uses a series of case studies to build the argument against private equity, pointing to soaring Danish property prices and creaking British water infrastructure. O’Brien, a Guardian journalist, is stronger on politics than economics, effectively illustrating the societal and moral implications of when funds take the place of governments.