This month's debuts to delight in: Endling by Maria Reva, Maggie; or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar by Katie Yee, Dead Lucky by Connor Hutchinson

Yeva is a Ukrainian biologist who lives and works out of her mobile laboratory, scouring the country for rare-breed snails which she is trying to save from extinction.

Yeva’s loved ones have no time for her scientific mission and urge her to settle down. What Yeva’s relatives don’t know is that she is busy making money from a side job – working for a marriage agency that offers romance tours to Western men looking for submissive women.

Yeva goes on dates with foreign bachelors, pretending to be entertained by them whilst thinking about her snails and racking up enough cash to refurbish her lab and continue her vocation.

When Yeva meets Nastia and Solomiya, activist sisters who are planning a mass kidnap, things become ever more surreal.

I was gripped by Yeva’s journey across her beautiful, war-ravaged country with her fragile yet hardy snails, a symbol of hope and endurance even when death seems inevitable. Brilliant.

Our narrator, a Chinese-American woman, is out for dinner with her husband. Expecting a lovely evening, her instinct is to laugh when he tells her he is having an affair with a woman named Maggie.

She did not see this coming and it’s not long after his shock revelation and fast removal to his parents’ palatial home that she starts to feel an ache in her chest.

Her best friend tells her the pain is a manifestation of her heartbreak but the doctor tells her that it is, in fact, breast cancer. We follow the narrator as she deals with these two simultaneous sucker punches, becoming more powerful as she beds into the new life she is creating.

Beautifully written, funny and sad. It’s good on divorce, illness, infidelity and bi-racial relationships. Wonderful.

Jamie works as an embalmer at a funeral home in Manchester and thinks his girlfriend of nine years, Rebecca, who works at Selfridges, is way out of his league.

Embalming is a vocation for Jamie, who was only 18 when he watched his dad die from liver damage. He wants to help make death easier for other relatives to deal with.

Jamie and Rebecca live in a rented flat above a kebab shop and Rebecca is desperate for them to buy a house together.

But there’s lots he’s not telling her about his financial situation. The truth is Jamie is in the grip of a terrible gambling addiction and can’t see a way out. Compelling.