Amanda Craig

Rachel Kelly, a respected former journalist on the Times, might seem the most blessed of women: five children, marriage to the banker Sebastian Grigg and a large house in Notting Hill. However, soon after her second child was born she suffered a breakdown of a most acute kind. Terrified, and in such distress that all she could keep saying over and over was ‘I’m going to crash,’ her account of her illness is harrowing to read. It follows the Turkish novelist Elif Shafak’s recent description of her post-natal depression, Black Milk, Stephanie Merritt’s 2008 memoir The Devil Within and Andrew Solomon’s masterly The Noonday Demon.

Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room, however, the setting is not present-day America but that of 1876. Blanche is travelling on a train with her new friend Jenny. She hears several loud cracks and feels something hot and wet fall on her face. When she collects her senses, Jenny lies dead. Like Kate Atkinson, Donoghue straddles the literary and the crime genre. Room, inspired by the discovery of a number of women abducted and impregnated by their captors, should have won the 2010 Orange Prize and didn’t — perhaps because its subject matter was simply too controversial. Frog Music, like Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter, is a return to a historical setting.

Sex, spies, aristocrats and atom bombs — the Profumo affair is in the news again, thanks to the recent Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about Stephen Ward. William Nicholson has chosen to hang his seventh novel around it in Reckless, which takes place between the end of the second world war and the Cuban missile crisis. Our hero, Rupert, is a quiet Englishman and aide to Lord Mountbatten. During the war he is invited to tea at Cliveden, where he meets the teenage Princess Elizabeth in the company of a Russian and an American; inspired by her gentle thoughtfulness, the three young officers vow a pact for there to be ‘no more wars’. The ensuing two decades intertwine the personal and the political as the world inches towards nuclear Armageddon.