LITERARY FICTION.(Features)

Byline: BY JOHN HARDING

THEN BY JULIE MYERSON (Cape [pounds sterling]12.99 ? [pounds sterling]10.99) SOME TIME in the near future. London is a frozen wasteland after a cataclysmic climate event.

An amnesiac woman struggles to exist, holed up in an office building in the City of London with a small band of survivors, trying desperately to cope with the intense cold, the shortage of food and the loss of electricity, mobile phones and all the other necessities of modern life.

Gradually she begins to construct a picture of her former self. She learns she was married, had children and an affair. But where are the children now? Where, too, her lover and her husband? Myerson's eighth novel evolves from the blurry uncertainty of a Kafkaesque dreamscape into a riveting story where the dystopia gradually recedes in importance and what it's actually about begins to reveal itself: the fragmentation of the self brought about by the loss of someone you love, the difficulty of coping with everyday existence afterwards and the extreme places that grief can sometimes take us to.

It's a daring and dazzling performance that confirms Myerson as a novelist who can increasingly be relied upon to come up with another new book that is both different and good.

RIVER OF SMOKE BY AMITAV GHOSH (John Murray [pounds sterling]20 ? [pounds sterling]17.99) FOLLOWING the Man Booker short-listed Sea Of Poppies, this second part of a trilogy about the 19th-century opium trade finds us in Canton in 1838 and covers the events leading up to the Opium Wars between Britain and China.

The central character, Bahram, is a selfmade Bombay merchant who has staked his all on taking a huge shipment of opium from the growing fields of India to sell in China, as he has done many times before.

But potential disaster strikes when the Chinese authorities, in an effort to save their country from the morass of addiction it is sinking into, prevent the cargo from entering.

Ghosh's novel is a tense, compelling account of the diplomatic stalemate that results.

It's a massive book whose author's baroque fascination for period detail and minor historical anecdote mimics Chinese boxes: he's never afraid to take you inside a digression inside another digression.

It could be boring, but it's not. The accumulation of minutiae puts the reader so firmly in the time and place that the whole thing becomes as hypnotic as an opium dream and pretty unputdownable.

It's promoted as a stand-alone read, but unexplained references to events in characters' previous lives from the earlier book suggest it would be rewarding to read that first.

THERE BUT FOR THE BY ALI SMITH (Hamish Hamilton [pounds sterling]16.99 ? [pounds sterling]14.99) IF YOU'RE looking for conventional narrative then Ali Smith is probably the last person to read. What she offers instead is off-the-wall imagination and some scintillating wordplay. The premise: suppose you gave a dinner party and a friend of a friend turned up with a stranger who halfway through the evening went upstairs, locked himself in the spare room, refused to leave and stayed for weeks? What follows is a barbed satire on our times, the growing absence of opportunity for quiet reflection and our inability to truly communicate with one another in the age of the mobile phone and the internet.

At the book's centre is the extended dinner party in a fashionable Greenwich house where the author's wit sparkles like cut glass. It would be truly appalling actually to be there, but as a reader you want it never to end.

There's also an extremely funny/sad passage in which a memory-challenged old lady makes a break for it from a hospital, and in both episodes Smith's ear for natural dialogue from completely different social milieus is unerringly accurate. Those who are ready to go with the flow will not be disappointed.