DIYA’S best friend and flatmate has died suddenly in FAMILY BUSINESS by Jonathan Sims (Gollancz, £18.99), and she’s unemployed, so the unexpected offer of a well-paid job is something of a lifesaver – even if it is a somewhat peculiar gig. 

She’s working for a small family business in London that for several generations has specialised in deep-cleaning properties after unexpected deaths. It can be gruesome – the deceased are not always discovered quickly – but there is a satisfaction in the hard labour of returning a home to its pristine condition. 

It pays Diya’s bills, and it helps take her mind away from her grief. If it wasn’t for the bizarre visions she sometimes experiences during her work, she could probably get used to it. That, and the eerie figure who seems to be behind many of Slough & Sons’ call-outs. 

The workaday setting in a familiar world of cleaning products, pubs and public transport is a perfect background for this moving and compelling horror story, in which three damaged young women refuse to surrender to evil no matter how seemingly great its power. 

Veronica Roth’s novella ARCH-CONSPIRATOR (Titan, £12.99) retells Sophocles’s ancient Athenian tragedy Antigone. This version takes place in a future, ruined Earth where only one city remains, surrounded by poisonous wasteland. 

Maintaining a viable human population is the state’s highest priority and breeding is compulsory. Women, in particular, have little autonomy over their bodies or their futures. 

Antigone is the daughter of the previous ruler, who was killed in the uprising that brought her uncle to power in his place. Niece and uncle cannot afford to trust each other, but through the use of multiple viewpoints Roth dismantles any simplistic ideas the reader may develop of who is right and who is wrong. 

Highly ambitious, and very readable, this demonstrates the power of the novella form to pack many themes, questions, and subtleties of plot and character into a small space. 

HELL BENT by Leigh Bardugo (Gollancz, £20) is the follow-up to Ninth House, and if anything it’s even better. 

We’re back at Yale University, where the secret societies, which the outside world imagines are merely back-scratching boys’ clubs, are in fact centres of magic, used through generations to benefit their high-born alumnae. 

Our guide, Alex Stern, is an official of the ninth house, established to curb or at least cover up the excesses of the original eight. She moves in this world of privilege, to which she was emphatically not born, very much on sufferance. Mounting an unauthorised journey to hell to rescue a colleague is almost certain to see her expelled — that is, in the unlikely event of her survival. 

This series mingles portal fantasy, murder mystery, conspiracy thriller and supernatural horror into something like a dark version of The Glittering Prizes. But at heart it’s about the real life horrors caused by the unquestioned entitlement that comes with hereditary wealth and the institutions it spawns.