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Never having ventured beyond Torquay, [Stella] dreams of running off to Paris with Valentine and avoiding the boring existence of her capable mother and dutiful stepfather. She longs for her real life to begin. But, when it does, it isn't what she was expecting. \"I wasn't that clever, was I?\" says Stella. Pregnant and abandoned, she drops out of school to have her son. Now she feels cheated, \"as if the books I'd loved had held out a promise of strong, bright, meaningful happenings they couldn't deliver\".

With each narrow escape from death, \"the black bat\", [Ursula Todd]'s progress takes a different route. A teenage rape leads to her union with a wife-beater in Wealdstone. She marries a dashing German, has a daughter and befriends Eva Braun. Staying unmarried, she embarks on several affairs during the Blitz. And it's not just Ursula's future which hangs in the balance. Characters succumb to the 1918 'flu epidemic but don't die. Or do they? [Kate Atkinson] keeps us guessing. With her nod to Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence, we never quite know which is the definitive account.

In recycling this story, O'Donnell includes Mary Jeffries, the notorious madam and trafficker whose girls and boys catered for a \"late night finish\" for such eminent gents as Leopold II of Belgium and \"Dirty Bertie\", later Edward VII. But she weaves in, too, the tribulations of the Jeremiah Minahan, an Irish police inspector demoted for not being bent enough. Minahan had put Jeffries's Chelsea brothels under surveillance and gathered sufficient intelligence to embarrass, personally, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt.

With her stories about the tensions of middle-class families, [Joanna Trollope] consistently picks women's-page issues. In The Soldier's Wife, she continues to explore the power balance in relationships and whether it's possible to be happy if we subjugate our desires to someone else. What better setting than the army? There's still no real role for the wives who follow the drum, but are just as educated and capable as their husbands. The men may crave the \"comforting dictatorship of duties\", but will 21st-century women put up with being Stepford wives on the Salisbury Plain?

[Matthew Sweet]'s entertainingly informative The West End Front fields a democratic cast: from crowned heads such as King Zog, paying his bills at the Ritz with gold bullion, to communists like nonagenarian Max Levitas, still resident in Stepney. If, as Sweet suggests, most Home Front histories celebrate a plucky pulling together, using the words 'We\" or \"Our\" in their titles, he has chosen to talk about \"Them\". Packing in the anecdotes, Sweet dots his pages with colourful walk-ons (\"Artful Charlie\", \"Baba Blackshirt\") and tantalising vignettes (Dylan Thomas licking gravy from an MI5 girl's legs). His impressive list of interviewees feature Victor Legg, employed for 50 years at the Ritz, Joe Gilmore, Savoy barman who mixed cocktails for Sinatra and stashed whisky for Churchill, and Crown Prince Alexander, born to exiled parents in Claridge's Suite 212, transformed for the occasion into Yugoslav territory.

The author of Suite Franaise follows Hlne from eight to 21 while turbulent events (the Great War, the Bolshevik revolutions) chase her rootless parents from Kiev and St Petersburg to Finland, Sweden and France. As in her other works - all fluidly translated by [Sandra Smith] - Nmirovsky catches the insecurity of displacement: what it means to be a foreigner wherever you go. But the lack of stability begins at home. Bella, Hlne's mother, has married \"down\", her feckless father having squandered three fortunes. Self-pitying, she hankers for excitement: \"To hold a man... when she didn't even know his name\", to live in Paris \"alone and free\".

The book's weakness lies in its central premise. Why does the fictional [Benjamin Markovits] go to so much trouble over [Peter Sullivan]'s life and oeuvre? He argues that [Byron] treated writing \"as a kind of code\" and that \"what's moving about the poetry isn't the story it tells but the real history it refers to\". But when he adds, \"It seems natural to apply the same standard to Peter,\" the reader may disagree. Peter Sullivan or Benjamin Markovits, whatever name he goes by, isn't Byron.

One of [Julie Myerson]'s strengths lies in creating atmosphere. She rips up the narrative to create a fragmented story. With Izzy's traumatic disorientation, time ceases to be linear. Things occur that she can't fathom, and then resonate as they occur again. Words are said by a character only to be repeated in another context in another time in an \"endless, heartbreaking loop of consequences\". As the amnesiac fog starts to shift, Izzy recalls that she once owned a house with roses around the door, grew vegetables, had a family, had an affair. She has \"done bad things\". But like someone in a Greek myth, she's condemned to a cycle of repetition.

In [Helen Oyeyemi Picador]'s playful new novel, a character complains: \"With books you've got to know all about other books that are like the one you're talking about, and it's just never-ending, and it's a pain.\" Indeed. A novel partly about the creative act of writing, Mr [FOX] includes a string of literary name-checks from Foxe's Book of Martyrs and Cappelanus's 12th-century treatise De Amore to The Hound of the Baskervilles and Madame Bovary.

It would be easy to ridicule these children of '68, but [Linda Grant] doesn't. For all his cleverness, [Stephen Newman] has kept his innocence. Having taken early retirement, he surfs the net, recoiling from the hatred directed at Americans and Jews. And he's haunted by the possibility that his parents' generation, proving its mettle in the war, was more interesting than his. \"What did we accomplish?\" he asks. His widowed father, still going strong at 90, nurses a secret which will shake Stephen's sentimental view of his background. Even Stephen's children seem tougher, more cynical. They don't want to make the world a better place. [Marianne], a war photographer, and [Max], a magician, accept it the way it is. In his mid-fifties Stephen realises that \"nothing bad had ever happened to him\". When it does, he's reduced to screaming: \"Why her? Why my wife?\" Grant's sentences can be over-long and she switches tenses disconcertingly. But she's compassionate and perceptive. Stephen and [Andrea] marry for convenience but grow devoted. That is what made it so good. Love is what matters, Grant tells us. Marianne cannot love herself until she falls in love. And even unloveable Grace, in the sad and moving ending, shows that she's not a total monster in her final acts of tenderness towards Andrea.