Jane is tough, liberated and smart (and can wield a mean sword), and Long has fun subverting the stereotypes, sexual and racial, of the original novels. What follows is at once a homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars novels and a tongue-in-cheek critique of the same. Jane Carver, a 6ft-tall biker and ex-Airborne Ranger in hiding from the law on a charge of manslaughter, wakes up to find herself on Waar, a planet light years from Earth and populated by bestial, shamanistic centaur-tiger hybrids, the Aarurrh, and more enlightened humanoid Orans. Jane Carver of Waar by Nathan Long (Nightshade Books, £9.99) The Silver Bough is the work of a writer at the height of her powers. Tuttle beautifully evokes local landscape and Scottish myth, and delineates her central characters' reactions to events with scalpel-sharp psychological insight while building towards a truly amazing finale. When the village is cut off by a landslide, the strange and the numinous subtly encroach on reality, and things begin to change. Three American women find themselves in the small Argyllshire village of Appleton, each seeking something after suffering loss, and each relating in their own way to a mysterious young man known as Ronan.

Tuttle writes lyrical fantasies that haunt the borders of myth and horror, combining an eye for everyday minutiae with a fantasist's ability to create the magical.

The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle (Jo Fletcher Books, £14.99)

When he receives a radio transmission from outside, he makes a decision to leave behind his familiar life and embark on a one-way journey into the unknown. Hig lives on a remote airfield with his dog and a cantankerous, gun-toting neighbour, occasionally flying his Cessna into the wilds and dreaming of a better life. With humankind depleted, the world in ruins, and survivors left to fend for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world, how could they be otherwise? Heller's first novel, described in the blurb as 'Cormac McCarthy's The Road but with hope', shows how: have a rugged, humane first-person narrator describe – with quiet rage, yet unbowed determination – a world ravaged by a flu pandemic in which he and one other are the sole survivors. Most post-apocalyptic novels, by their very nature, are despairing beasts. The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline Review, £14.99)

The dog stars peter heller review