To Rise Again At A Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris (Viking £16.99, ebook £5.69) 3/5 stars

PAUL O’Rourke is your average affluent-but-alienated Manhattan dentist, a diehard Red Sox fan with a string of failed relationships behind him. Though Paul professes nihilism, he is fascinated by religious faith.

So when he starts to find himself being impersonated online by an obscure Old Testament sect, he is ripe for reluctant conversion.

As Paul broods on his failed romances and slowly starts to lose grip on reality, we wonder: Will he stay or will he go? To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a meditation of faith and unbelief, a 21st Century comedy of manners, and a powerful polemic on oral hygiene.

Dan Brotzel

The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (Doubleday £18.99, ebook £6.64) 3/5 stars 

BAXTER and Pratchett’s latest collaboration begins as a catastrophic eruption of the Yellowstone super- volcano forcibly accelerates emigration from our Earth to the thousands of ‘stepwise’ duplicates explored in the previous books.

But, as the title suggests, another new frontier has opened up too.

In many ways, this continues the Long Earth sequence in accustomed form; the established sense of wonder and inventiveness are still present and correct. But the exposition sometimes seems clumsier than in the first two books.

Alex Sarll

A Song For Issy Bradley by Carys Bray (Hutchinson £12.99, ebook £6.49) 4/5 stars 

THE Bradleys – mum, dad and boisterous kids – live in a state of happy family chaos, at the centre of which is their Mormon faith.

But when tragedy strikes, mum Claire responds to disaster not by stoically enduring, but by falling into a deep depression.

While it has its comic moments, this book deals with the big issues.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Jackie Kingsley