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HALF LIFE Roopa Farooki Macmillan Pounds 11.99 Pakistan-born Roopa has followed up her Orange Prize short-listed debut, Bitter Sweets, with Half Life, a heart-warming story about love and relationships.

One day, Aruna, still wearing her flimsy sleep clothes and flip- flops and carrying nothing but a handbag, decides to up sticks and leave her home in east London - booking a flight to her home country of Singapore.

The book is split into three main points of view - Arupa, her childhood friend and ex-love Jazz and Jazz's estranged and dying father Hassan.

With each chapter, we learn more about each character, such as how Arupa met her adoring husband Patrick and how Jazz has moved on with his life since his ex broke his heart.

Half Life may well be a slow-burner of a book, but you won't be disappointed.

Shereen Low SLEEPLESS Replica Maurice Lacroix Watches Charlie Huston Orion Books Pounds 12.99 After a series of vampire noir novels and revitalising Marvel Comics' brutal vigilante Moon Knight, Huston's latest offers another new breed of urban nightmare.

Parker Haas is an undercover cop in the gloomy near-future LA of a world slightly worse than our own. Predictions about gang warfare, fundamentalist terrorism and environmental collapse are all coming true.

Plus there's an Replica YSL handbags epidemic of ultimately-fatal insomnia affecting 10 per cent of the population.

Parker's supposedly investigating an illicit trade in the one drug that gives relief, but we know LA detective stories aren't that simple.

It takes a while to get to grips with the strands of Huston's narrative, but this is still a gripping and worryingly-plausible thriller.

Alex Sarll SPOONER Pete Dexter Atlantic Books Pounds 12.99 American novelist Pete Dexter, writer of the award-winning Paris Trout, uses a lifetime of experience to colour his latest offering - part autobiographical, part memoir, part novel.

Retired naval officer Calmer Ottosson is thrust into Warren Spooner's world in this story examining the relationship between stepfather and son.

Spooner is a troubled child, perceived as an oddity. His twin brother Clifford was stillborn, a tragedy enhanced when his father dies soon after. Spooner grows up the neighbourhood oddball. However, his viewpoints are challenged upon the arrival of his stepfather. Stability, a positive influence and love and support overshadow his childhood and adult scrapes.

Dexter's tragicomedy is not without flaws, but despite some difficult subject matter, it is witty and entertaining.

James Cleary