The Smiths by Michael Bracewell (White Rabbit, 122pp, £14.99)You could call it a 100-page love letter, or an extended album review. Or a poem manifesting as a novella. No, wait – it’s a surrealist sortie into a man’s love of music, French New Wave film and the city of Manchester. Essentially, though, we have here a 1980s coming of age tale/memoir framed by the canon of the author’s favourite band, The Smiths. Bracewell describes them as “nothing less than a declaration of life as I had found it”. With a haunting, in-depth exploration of lyrics and music, it’s a must for Smiths fans. But it will also resonate with music lovers who lived through those bittersweet years and “experienced alone, on the top deck of a bus most probably” songs that moved a generation. Beautifully written.Offseason by Avigayl Sharp (W&N, 296pp, £14.99) In Offseason, a 29-year-old English teacher takes a temporary post in a New England seaside town. In a breathless, deadpan, internal monologue, we learn of the narrator’s upbringing, the drugs she avails of, her patchy love life, intergenerational trauma caused by the Holocaust, academic rigidity and her conversations with her psychiatrist. By turns didactic and verbally self-indulgent in her teaching methods, her Charles Dickens fixation is bested only by an obsession with Josef Stalin. The author is a multiaward winner and writes well, can be witty, insightful and entertaining, but possibly not for 296 pages. For the Zillennial reader, it’s got all the goodies and will surely entertain. Miranda July fans will love this book. Not for the Claire Keegan enthusiast, however.Sail Away Land by Ben Pester (Granta, 190pp, £14.99) In these beautiful, unsettling stories we sail away more than we reach land. Towards fear-fringed horizons or dream-depths that splinter and rearrange themselves so that layers of time and location interrupt each other constantly. People spend time-vacant evenings just fading away. Reality is here, but morphs wildly, as with a woman prey to a scum landlord whose damp walls become spongy and begin to implode. During a promotion interview in the title tale, the narrator vomits up a postcard from his broken childhood and his interviewers couldn’t care less. Pester has a moving compassion for all creatures on this voyage; they are blisteringly raw, they often try hard, but are taunted constantly by the past and fractured by a bewildering present. Brilliant, disruptive writing.