Every time I go to the front door the strip of carpet in the hall moves forward slightly, towards the door Every week or so I have to pull it back. Now there’s something I can use.’Dear Room’ is published by Faber at £8.99. To buy a copy (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897 or post your order to PO Box 60, Helston TR13 0TP. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (FABER £7.99)

Ishiguro is expert at building narratives while withholding information, challenging his readers to piece together facts of which his narrators are unaware, with little more to go on than some significant glances, nuances of speech and disconnected fragments of memory.

It’s clear from page one that this novel takes place in a slightly skewed version of reality, because he manages to imbue a few words – carer, donor, recovery centre – with disproportionate unease. But for the most part, it’s set in what seems an idyllic English boarding school, where free-spirited children enjoy rounders and art lessons under the benign tutelage of Hailsham’s guardians. You’re some way into the book before you notice it’s odd that none of the children ever mentions their parents.
Now 31, Kathy H is a carer. Having cared for Ruth and Tommy, the children she was closest to at Hailsham, she’s compelled to relive their formative years. Nostalgic memories of their shared childhood tumble on to the page, and she minutely dissects them: “Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about who we were, how we were different… but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant.” The final loss of innocence arrives in a splurge of exposition at the end, which feels rushed in comparison to the almost excruciatingly exact build-up. But it brings with it uncomfortable feelings and difficult questions – about love, morality, biological destination and scientific ethics – which linger long afterwards.Hitler’s Piano Player by Peter Conradi (DUCKWORTH £8.99)Doubtless there are already books about Hitler’s butcher, baker and candlestick maker, too, but Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl was a far from peripheral figure in the rise of Nazism, and lived a life worthy of the kind of serious, thorough yet nimble biography which Conradi has written.

Born in 1887, Putzi could be found as a child playing piano while his parents entertained, in grand style, guests as varied as Richard Strauss, Mark Twain and Buffalo Bill. Educated at Harvard, he moved to New York aged 24, and worked as an art dealer, cultivating a relationship with the Roosevelts which would later prove significant.Back in Munich, in 1922, Putzi was working as a foreign correspondent when he saw an intense and charismatic, if misguided, politician gave a speech. Recognising Hitler’s potential, Putzi funded Mein Kampf and became his press secretary, devising the sieg heil salute, and doing his best to make Hitler into a more cultivated figure by introducing him to fine music, high society, and advising him on his clothes and moustache.But by 1939, Putzi had distanced himself from the extremism at Nazism’s core, and he’d made an enemy of Goebbels, so thought it prudent to escape to Switzerland. When war broke out, he was recruited by Roosevelt to compile profiles of Hitler and his cronies for US intelligence. An exemplary piece of biographical writing, Hitler’s Piano Player is packed with colour and character, and offers a distressingly intimate portrait of the F?r, from a unique, divided perspective.May Contain Nuts by John O’Farrell (BLACK SWAN £6.99) The coffee-morning chatter among a group of middle-class parents is interrupted when one of them suddenly leaps across the room to snatch a biscuit from her four-year-old’s hand, because it may contain nuts Alice apologises – she didn’t realise Cameron was allergic. But Cameron’s parents don’t know if he is or not; they’ve just never exposed him to nuts because it’s not worth the risk.

Welcome to the anxiety-ridden world of over-protective, hyper-competitive parenting, the object of O’Farrell’s latest satirical broadside.Alice and her husband live in a leafy part of London where they maintain a perfectly regulated hothouse environment for their three children. But as the children get older it gets harder to protect them from all the rottweilers, speeding cars, black teenagers and other menaces that lurk round every corner of the city, which is why it’s imperative to Alice that her 10-year-old, Molly, gets into the safe enclave of a private school in Chelsea. Alice is prepared to dress as a 10-year-old and take the entrance exam herself, if necessary. Alice’s hideous husband and friends are soft targets, and O’Farrell pokes them mercilessly.