STILL MISSING BY BETH GUTCHEON (Persephone £12)

A six-year-old kisses his mum goodbye, sets off for school but never arrives. it is every parent's worst nightmare, and the nail-biting suspense throughout this brilliant novel (first published in 1981) is almost unendurable.

The mother experiences lacerating guilt, anxiety, hopes raised, hopes dashed, media intrusion, hate mail, attacks from nutcases and an utterly dedicated but intrusive crime squad.

From tragic figure to grief-crazed hysteric, her long days are filled with 'the dim memory of the deep unremarkable joy of hugging her child'.

Gutcheon sustains the tension to the very end, and as you read, your mind inevitably wanders to the real-life suffering, in similar circumstances, of the tragic parents of Madeleine Mccann.

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT BY JEANETTE WINTERSON (vintage £20)

Described as a 'blazing debut', Winterson's 1985 novel won the prestigious Whitbread prize. it is very funny, with an Alan Bennett sort of humour, beautifully written, quirky and likely to cause much tut-tutting in conservative quarters.

Its heroine, Jeanette, is working-class, bright, adopted and being raised by a bonkers bible-bashing mum. They live in a northern mill-town in a humble back-to-back and Jeanette's life is one long round of bible quizzes, prayer meetings, tambourine-rattling, saving souls on the home front and general evangelical lunacy.

'You can always tell a good woman by her sandwiches,' announces the Pastor, who is soon frothing and freaking when teenage Jeanette turns out to be gay and falls in love with a girl convert.

'These children of God have fallen foul of their lusts,' thunders the Pastor while his appalled followers warble the hymn yield not To Temptation.