Alan Opts Out by Courtney MaumJohn Murray, 342pp, £20American Maum used to work in marketing, driving around Paris in a branded car convincing French people to buy Mexican beer. Such life experience has fed into this hilarious satire about a successful ad-man who deliberately abandons the rat race. While bidding for a huge US dairy account, the screen-friendly farmer employed to sell Alan’s campaign instead delivers a diatribe on the evils of capitalism. Reeling from the loss of this career-changing account, Alan has an epiphany: the farmer is right. Within weeks, Alan is living in the children’s playhouse, walking barefoot and conversing with a live lobster. Meanwhile, his wife Vivian is attempting to win a place in the uber-posh Queen Annes, an exclusive community of millionaire tradwives, with Alan’s increasingly erratic behaviour setting them on course for domestic Armageddon. Brilliantly written and properly funny, this is a perfect summer read. John Walshe Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips Fleet, 197pp, £20Pulitzer Prize winner Jayne Anne Phillips was born in Buckhannon, West Virginia, in 1952. Small Town Girls is as much about her home as her youth, as she reflects on the mountaintop mining of the 1980s that destroyed both the environment and the economy of her home state, recounts infamous feuding families the Hatfields and McCoys, and extols the virtues of fellow West Virginian short story writer Breece D’J Pancake. In beautiful, lyrical prose, she recounts the memories that “slide through time like the slow, saturated frames of a home movie”, when summers were “a long, spooled dream”, and a dog’s brown eyes have “the look of a thousand sorrows”, while musing on the writing life and the perspective gained through ageing: “The painful thing about adolescence is that everything seems absolute, and the painful thing about adulthood is that nothing does.” Wonderful. John WalsheFour Terrible Parents by Calla Henkel John Murray, 366pp, £18.99When the end of the touring road is nigh for two dwindling rockstars, they embark with their partners on the renovation of a hotel that has been left to feisty and secretive frontwoman Valentine. In the Gothic house in South Carolina, the foursome agree to give up their old, glamorous lives in Berlin and New York to raise a child together. Whether you are keen on restoration, modern families, spookiness or detective stories, the book offers a hook for everyone. Henkel’s twisty, fluid writing takes a fresh look at friendship, autonomy and multiple parentage. More interestingly, it cuts open and rummages around in the things that are passed down from generation to generation – a crumbling property, an unshakeable sense of shame and hidden truths. Céire Sadlier