Leveret's and loss in this weeks literary fiction: Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley, A Real Piece of Work by Freya Bromley, The Leveret by Anna Goldreich

Unreliable narrators rarely come harder to pin down than Mary – and Mary would probably agree.

A novelist from York with an acclaimed book to her name, she recounts to us the story of her seemingly routine childhood: family life, school, friends.

Yet she also tells us she is on antipsychotic medicine and is aware some of her memories are false – a symptom, she says, of her illness. But how does she know this? And what is the truth about her Jewish grandfather and his role in the Second World War?

This strange slippery exploration of memory and inherited trauma by a former Booker nominee never fully comes into focus, and this, you suspect, is both its weakness and its strength.

Freya Bromley’s memoir The Tidal Year recounted 12 months spent swimming every tidal pool in Britain following the death of her brother.

Her debut novel shares similar territory and is also, perhaps, a comment on her experience of writing that book. It’s the story of Nola, an anxious twentysomething who has written an acclaimed memoir about her dead sister.

Yet members of Nola’s family have never been fully on board, and when someone makes an anonymous complaint, threatening the planned film adaptation, she starts to suspect those closest to her.

Bromley is good on how people experience grief in sometimes irreconcilably different ways and raises interesting questions about author responsibility and the ownership of stories – yet the novel felt very inert to me. Time, perhaps, for a change of scene.

When Clare finds an abandoned baby hare, deep within bramble, she licks clean its face.

Months previously, she gave birth to a stillborn baby six months into her pregnancy and is frozen with grief.

Recently, she and her partner Phoebe moved to Norfolk to start a new life in a rural farming community. But where Phoebe has thrown herself into farm work, Clare has remained trapped in twilight.

Now, though, she finally has a baby to look after. Naming the leveret Isla, she starts taking it everywhere, which becomes a problem once the hare – a wild animal – starts to behave like one.

Told in alternate chapters, with Phoebe’s no-less-grief-stricken account offering a sobering counterpart to Clare’s, Goldreich’s novel tracks a careful line through ideas of delusion, love and the nastily isolating nature of baby loss with precise and piercing lyricism.