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Julie Otsuka has good rhythm, sentences that move to a satisfying beat. Even as her tone shifts — from tender to funny to cynical to sinister — the beat goes on uninterrupted. In this, her third novel, the narrative has a steady flow. The Swimmers traces the cracks that develop in an underground pool, and in a woman’s mind, and the slow and unavoidable deterioration of both. It opens with an introduction to the pool that reads like a guided tour from the swimmers themselves. We learn about their rituals: ‘Some of us have to swim 100 laps every day, others… until the bad thoughts go away (Sister Catherine, lane two).’ There are dos and don’ts and people to watch out for — ‘tailgaters, lane Nazis, arm flailers’.

Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both the possibility and implications of choosing one’s life and dealing with the consequences, will be familiar with her apparent capriciousness. Her prose — freewheeling, elliptical, a tangle of jokiness and jeopardy — seems to capture the puzzle of proportionality: how seriously should we take this one life we have, and how can we hope to balance our opposing urges towards levity and gravity?

Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a book every two years, including The Finkler Question, which won the Man Booker in 2010. Given that he was put on Earth to write, why the wait? This is the subject of Mother’s Boy, a tale of self-persecution in the form of a monologue which includes interjections from the ghosts of his parents and one chapter, recording a period in his twenties that he drifted through in a dream state, printed in a font resembling handwriting. ‘How’s the novel coming along?’ his father would routinely ask after Jacobson graduated from Cambridge with a ‘poor degree’ in English. He was taught by F.R.

‘One morning in late October 1988,’ begins The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street, ‘this dapper-looking guy from Leiden asked me if I might be able to deliver 7,000-odd Bibles to the Soviet Union.’ It’s the kind of line you might hear in a bar when you accidentally catch the eye of the resident storyteller — a tale so implausible it could just be true. Where on the scale between fact and fiction Pieter Waterdrinker’s memoir lies is impossible to tell, and beside the point: his engrossing 400-page account of post-Soviet disorder grips you and doesn’t let go.

No one boards an overladen dinghy and sets out across a choppy sea without very good reason. Laden into migrant boats go backstories as well as bodies: tales of war-hit homes and bloodied police cells, of empty larders and decrepit schools. But illegal migration is as much about what lies ahead as what’s left behind: the hope of a better life, the chance to start anew. That was certainly the case with Omar, a young Afghan taxi driver and former interpreter. Back when the Canadian-born freelance correspondent Matthieu Aikins first arrived in Kabul, the Corolla-owning Omar had been a single gung-ho guy about town. Seven years later, with foreign troops drastically reduced and dollar contracts hard to find, life was looking far less rosy.

The long 1990s began with the Pixies album Surfer Rosa in 1989 and ended with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Or perhaps the short 1990s began with Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991 and ended with The Matrix in 1999. Or perhaps the 1990s never really ended for those of us who have lived blissfully ever since in a mental version of Portlandia — the place where, according to that sitcom’s theme tune, ‘the spirit of the Nineties lives on’. Or perhaps the 1990s did end at some point in the new millennium, if only so that the 1990s revival could commence straight afterwards.