Mark is tattooed all over, and has a chequered past. His body is like a dream landscape, a swirling blue-green vision of gryphons, serpents and clockfaces. He is married to Samantha and they live with their little girl, Sally. But Mark is haunted by a spectre in the shape of Tony, his ex-lover, who kidnaps Sally. The story of the rescue - which involves Sam s mother, Peggy, and her lover Iris, a modern-day Orlando - is hilarious, touching and (occasionally) surreal. Marked for Life is instantly engaging, and curiously compelling. Magrs world is suburbia with a strange erotic genders are switched, absent lovers remain bizarrely but sweetly attentive, and sex blossoms in unexpected circumstances. Laced with a dry humour and written in a prose that is both sensuous and acerbic, Marked for Life is a wonderfully original first novel.

The ordinary inhabitants of a small-town council estate turn out to hold extraordinary secrets in Paul Magrs' strangely compelling novel, Could It Be Magic?. Set in the grey wastelands of the north-east, Magrs has looked beyond the ravages of boom and bust Britain—with its council ghettos and widespread unemployment—to reveal a community brimming with passions. At first glance, the leading characters are exceptional only in their Elsie, old before her time, weighed down by a crippled son and depressive husband, whose only solace lies in a bottle of gin; tattooed Mark, who spends his days bodybuilding and nights babysitting his ex-wife's new baby; Penny, who left school too soon and fills her house with students; Andy whose gay lover left him for a better life. But the arrival of Penny's Mam on New Year's Eve (with her own startling secret) sets off a chain of astonishing events. Fantasy mingles with the mundane until it's hard to know what to accept as commonplace and what to dismiss as trivial. A frisson of sexual energy sparks from council roof to satellite dish as Magrs' characters discover their innermost secrets and how to live life to the full. —Carey Green