Dangerous living

Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short stories, journalism, theatre, television or a combination of the above.

The Alarming Palsy of James Orr by Tom Lee (Granta, £12.99) takes a fable and transplants it into real life — in this case bourgeois southern British suburban life — where the neat conclusions we might draw from it if we encountered it in a more distilled form are muffled and made strange. The exemplar of Kafka is obvious (both Metamorphosis and The Trial); but I found myself thinking also of John Cheever, Richard Yates and other American writers who needle away at the pain and self-delusion behind the sleek lives of the executive class.

James Orr isn’t much of an unreliable narrator, just an ordinary, appalling white-collar mook, who has found himself in what would, in other hands, have been a classic horror-story location: New Glades, a 1960s development, ‘built on ancient woodland owned by a monstrously wealthy private trust’.