Matthew Mason

According to a 2016 report published by the World Health Organisation, Argentina is the ‘therapy capital of the world’, boasting 222 psychologists per 100,000 people. Reading the Argentine writer Pola Oloixarac’s Savage Theories, I can understand why. The novel is quick to mock the posturing of the academic world, especially in Buenos Aires The novel follows three characters, each more bizarre and beguiling than the last. First we have our narrator, Rosa. She is a philosophy student at the University of Buenos Aires who becomes obsessed with, and attempts to seduce, her elderly professor Augusto Garcia Roxler, whose ‘Theory of Egoic Transmissions’ charts man’s evolution from prey to predator.

In 2021, a financial newspaper estimated the American televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s wealth to be in the region of $750 million. This fortune has helped the preacher build a property empire and purchase a fleet of private jets – acquisitions, he says, ordained by God. Gillis, the principal character in Chris Kohler’s Phantom Limb, has not been quite so blessed. After suffering a knee injury in his twenties that derailed a promising athletics career in England, Gillis gave his life to the cloth. His decision to become a minister, however, came not from any love of God (in fact, Gillis isn’t even a believer), but because it promised to provide a life of relative comfort, complete with a place to live, a modest income and plenty of free time.

As Nicolas Padamsee’s thrilling debut novel England is Mine hurtles towards its climax, its principal character, David, readies himself for an important mission. A teenage victim of bullying, he has been slowly drawn into a world of online extremism. After making a purchase through the dark web, he is determined to become a hero in the underground network in which he is now enmeshed. In the same borough of East London, David’s one-time tormentor Hassan is about to leave the house. Having drifted away from his pot-smoking childhood friends, Hassan volunteers at his local mosque and is on the brink of signing an Esports contract that will turn his passion for the Fifa video game franchise into a profession.

Those one-time hellraisers the Young British Artists are today more likely to be found making noise complaints to the local council than sliding down the bannisters at the Groucho Club. But in his part-historical, part-satirical, part-autobiographical debut novel Art, Peter Carty returns to their heyday as he charts the birth of the movement that shook up the art world in the early 1990s. The setting is a now unrecognisable Hoxton and Shoreditch, devoid of puppy yoga studios and oat milk lattes. In the opening chapter, the principal characters meet in a grimy old pub to celebrate a private view at the nearby gallery, Idiot Savant. Here they discuss the most innovative works being produced in London: a series of blank books displayed on lecterns within a spacious vitrine.