Crushingly tender: The best Literary Fiction out now - Fulfillment by Lee Cole, Love Forms by Claire Adam, The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar

US author Cole didn’t get the fanfare he deserved for his 2022 debut, Groundskeeping, so fingers crossed for this compulsively readable follow-up, a tragicomic tale of sibling rivalry between half-brothers, each nursing unsated ambition in early midlife.

Joel is a married essayist in New York, while Emmett still lives in their Kentucky hometown, scraping a paycheck in an Amazon-style warehouse, his own dreams of authorship firmly on ice.

Long-simmering grudges come to the boil after Joel’s wife Alice, nudged into alcoholism by the pandemic, steals a tipsy kiss with Emmett behind closed doors at a family reunion.

As well as illicit sex, the plot involves a drugs heist, crank calls and a loaded gun, adding a crackle of jeopardy to Cole’s gift for fizzy dialogue and killer comic timing as he gently takes the temperature of modern America. Strongly recommended.

Adam made a splash with her prize-winning first novel Golden Child, about the unearthing of family strife when a teenager disappears.

Similar themes underpin this more ambitiously layered second novel, set in London and narrated by Dawn, a divorced mother who finds herself reflecting on the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption as a pregnant teenager in Trinidad.

Now 58, Dawn feels drawn to the online profile of an Italian biochemist who could plausibly be the grown-up child.

Adam pulls us into the murky tale with a deceptively unshowy style. She blindsides us with drip-fed revelations about Dawn’s youth while laying out her daily grind in the narrative present as an empty-nester forced out of her job as a GP due to the hard yards of childcare.

Crushingly tender, the novel explores heavy subjects without fuss.

Previously shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, Azar is an Iranian writer who lives in Australia as a political refugee, having been arrested several times on account of her work as a journalist.

Her sprawling new novel, set in Iran in the wake of 1979’s Islamic Revolution, is a decades-spanning magic realist saga anonymously translated from Farsi for fears of safety.

We first see the narrator as the teenage daughter of a university teacher in Tehran. The multi-threaded plotline is lit up by a search for her brother, lost during the Iran-Iraq war, to say nothing of a love plot involving two cousins with violently opposed politics.

Lent urgency by the context, this is a busy, noisy, crowded book that compels you to take the rough with the smooth.