Archie Bland

Oliver Tate, the hero of Submarine (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), is a monologophobic parthenologist. Roughly translated, this means he is interested in finding new words to describe what it’s like being a virginal 14-year-old in Swansea. So is Joe Dunthorne, whose first novel this is, and both he and Oliver are extremely good at what they set out to do. Dunthorne’s success is rooted in his star’s: Oliver is surely the most charming adolescent borderline sociopath since Martin Amis lit up The Rachel Papers with Charles Highway. This is the sort of teenager whose determination to help others overcome their distressing limitations is matched only by his blindness to how unwelcome such ministrations are.

Rarely has Nietzsche been taken so literally as in Ron Currie’s God Is Dead (Picador, £12.99), wherein the deity adopts the form of a Sudanese refugee woman called Sora, and is blown to physical and metaphysical bits by a Janjaweed bomb. Just before He dies, He wishes for someone he could pray to. That’s chapter one. Thereafter, everything goes to pot. In lieu of any religious ideology to fight over, war breaks out between the adherents of evolutionary psychology and postmodern anthropology. Africans worship the omniscient dogs that picked at Sora’s corpse; Americans adore toddlers, ‘tangible, blameless, and as cute as all hell’; the government struggles to keep people from spending their grocery money on multiple sets of Hungry Hippos.