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Pitched for those in business, A Story is a Deal: How to Use the Science of Storytelling to Lead, Motivate and Persuade, by British author/journalist Will Storr, is equally a primer for writers and storytellers in general. The author, employing graceful prose and a clear logic, explores the history and nature of the story as it dominates our lives as humans. According to him, humans need stories all the time, for connection, for establishing and maintaining status, and for hope. Examples from all manner of spheres illuminate the book’s message, some of them direct, some of them unexpected. And the final section of A Story Is a Deal offers wisdom about how to start and sustain stories of any kind whatsoever. This is an exceedingly generous, helpful insight into something at the core of our beings. Recommended.

Knives Out was a refreshingly zippy Agatha-Christie-style pastiche film that has spawned a number of mimics. The Residence, its eight episodes all written by Paul William Davies, has a splendid conceit at its core: the chief usher of the White House is murdered during a state banquet and the entire audience is locked up while the super-investigator, in this case birdwatcher Cordelia Cupp (played with brio and nuance by Uzo Aduba), exercises Poirot-style mental gymnastics to tease out the well-hidden culprit. The cinematography is lush and stylised, the cast is admirable, and the dialogue crackles with wit. Can this constrictive dramatic notion sustain eight episodes? I must confess to doubts around episodes three and four, but after the midway point, The Residence takes flight and zooms home to a satisfying climax. First-rate entertainment fare.

A debut novel by Australian writer Diana Reed, Signs of Damage mines familiar, rich novelistic territory in exploring family dynamics and the mysteries of the past. When a family head dies, the funeral prompts his wife, two daughters, and various others to look back to a family holiday a decade and a half earlier in a French villa, when a visitor went missing for hours. The burden of epileptic seizures is explored with nuance. Jumping back and forth between present and past is handled deftly, and the characters hold great potential, but the plot labours the various unfolding secrets and the voice of the narrator lurches between people who sound much like each other.

Well-regarded Irish short story writer Roisin O’Donnell’s debut novel Nesting tackles head-on the blight of male domestic violence. Confused and unconfident Ciara flees her Dublin home (for the second time, she returned the first time), with her two young daughters, to escape the relentless emotional bludgeoning and dominance of her husband. A familiar story in these times, and at first, reading the author’s close-up narrative account, I experienced that sense of familiarity as an impost. But the prose is impeccably crafted, full of lovely scene setting detail, and once I settled into the rhythm, the novel acquired the impetus of a thriller. Will Ciara succeed against her husband’s unremitting, cunning campaigns to persuade her to return? By the three-quarter mark, Ciara dons the mantle of a hero with an impossible quest, and the finale is achingly tense. Nesting is a beautiful, important literary work.

As an early devotee of Mick Herron (of Slow Horses fame), I took note when he praised an earlier instalment in British crime author Simon Mason’s now-four-book-strong DI Wilkins series. This “clashing duo” police procedural series features Detective Inspector Ray Wilkins, a handsome, posh-educated black investigative star, in tandem with and grinding against DI Ryan Wilkins, a trailer-trash opposite with instinctive investigative skills. Ray is smooth and cautious, Ryan brash and crass. Throughout the series, the author makes marvelous hay with the possibilities of this duality, bringing the reader to love both of them, even in opposition, as they often seem to be. The fourth book, A Voice in the Night, sees the Oxford-based pair tackling the baffling murder of an elderly professor in pyjamas, far from home. Unlike many crime writers assembling ongoing series, Simon Mason is utterly unafraid of upending the lives of his heroes, again and again, and in A Voice in the Night, Ryan in particular faces challenges that echo with classical tragedy. The author is an impeccable plotter and the writing, ebbing and flowing between lyrical place digressions, dramatic action scenes, and efficient procedural matter, is wonderful. As a prolific mystery reader, I cannot recall being taken with a book as I was with A Voice in the Night. Get it before Mason achieves fame.

How many books on longevity/healthfulness have I read over the past three years, since a health scare prompted selfish interest? I have lost count. Mostly they end up being well-meant exaggerations by doctors or researchers bursting to tell the world the new good news. The Ageless Brain: How to Sharpen and Protect Your Mind for a Lifetime by physician Dale Bredesen can spiral into overkill but it stands above the pack by enunciating clearly the advances in cognitive science over the recent and earlier decades. And the good doctor runs a clinic devoted, apparently successfully, to a protocol that does exactly what the book’s sub-title says. The chapter detailing his protocol (which includes three biomarkers for early identification of cognitive downturn, something I’d never seen before and now intend to pursue) is worth the price of the book alone. But the entire book, expressed clearly (if sometimes breathlessly), is a master class in scientific communication. The Ageless Brain is just the book for you if you have interest (theoretical or self-centered) in how to stave of the cliche of the aging brain.