An army on the move must be as disturbing as it is, on occasion, inspiring. In E.L. Doctorow’s startlingly good civil war novel The March, General Sherman’s column proceeds inexorably through the southern United States like a giant organism. It appears as “a great segmented body moving in contractions and dilations at a rate of 12 or 15 miles a day, a creature of 100,000 feet. It is tubular in its being and tentacled to the roads and bridges over which it travels.’'

Absorbed meets Allison at the end of her relationship with Owen. They are at a New Year's Eve party when she realises that their 10-year partnership has wound down. So far, so normal. But even within this introduction, we are drawn into Allison's head, the promise clear that the anxieties she hears on a daily basis will become secondary characters to the plot itself.

According to Rosie Wilby, “breaking up and staying together are simply two sides of the same coin.

School assembly: one of the many great traditions to be upended by the pandemic. According to this novel, that might not be such a bad thing.

The glamorous unreliability of Esther Freud’s father, Lucian Freud, is an inescapable force in her novels. There he is, turning up like a bad penny in Love Falls, or The Wild, or Peerless Flats, leaping from taxis into restaurants or betting shops, ordering champagne, driving too fast, shifting from foot to foot in the darkness, ambivalent, alluring.

It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage doors of perception, this round-up of recent, new and forthcoming music books surveys an artist roster disparate enough to grace the finest of festival bills.

In 1992 Martin Amis published a story, “Career Move”, in which the writers of sensational screenplays with titles like Decimator and Offensive from Qasar 13 read their work to empty rooms in shabby pubs. Meanwhile, wealthy and fêted poets pen verses entitled “Composed at – Castle” or “To Sophonisba Anguiscola” and their agents immediately juggle megabuck offers from LA: “In poetry, first class was something you didn't need to think about. It wasn’t discussed.

In the first short story of Lucy Caldwell’s collection Intimacies, “Like This”, one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to a parent occurs. On the spur of a stressful moment in a café, an overloaded mother takes her screaming toddler to the toilet and leaves her baby in its pram with a woman she barely knows. When she returns, the pram is still there, but the baby is gone: “You have left the most helpless, precious thing you own with a complete and utter stranger.”

"Trompe-l’œil," explains the director of the Institut de Peinture in Brussels, “is the meeting of a painting and a gaze, conceived for a particular point of view, and defined by the effect it is supposed to produce”. In layman’s terms, it is the art of decorative painting, the technique of creating an optical illusion whereby a surface appears three-dimensional. It’s also the subject of this book.

Nancy Mitford's 1945 literary sensation looks poised to be the TV talking point of the season, assuming the first episode of The Pursuit of Love sustains its utterly infectious energy through two hours still to come.