I like very much what Jhumpa Lahiri has done in Whereabouts, building a portrait of a woman in forty-six vignettes, each not much more than a few pages long. Every short scene frames and focuses the narrator, building her character much like a movie might, taking the reader step by step and deeper and deeper into her solitude. The challenge the novelist sets herself is an ambitious one because each short chapter invites close, separate examination much like a collection of short stories might. The brevity somehow encourages close scrutiny, and that sometimes exposes an occasional flaw in the brilliance and a certain unevenness in the overall texture of the novel. No matter. This is an accomplished and subtly accretive study of urban isolation that cleverly sedates you and entangles you in a person’s inner life.

Klara is an AF (an Artificial Friend), a humanoid robot that parents, in this near-future dystopia set in the United States, buy to be company for their children. Klara, though not the most up-to-date model, is quite advanced and has been programmed to have a range of human characteristics and emotions – pity, anxiety, fear, and even possibly love. Klara is purchased to be Josie’s friend. Her duties go little further than being a companion to Josie, a sickly teenager who lives at home with her mother and Melania Housekeeper (a nice touch). When Josie’s condition starts to deteriorate, Klara pleads with The Sun to restore her with its healing powers.

Ishiguro’s imagined future is a grim one, but perhaps not much more grim than our present. It’s a place with a rigid caste system in which the “raised” are the elite, a place where the homeless still sleep in doorways and pollution still obscures the sun, and a place where children do almost everything through their “rectangles”. But Ishiguro’s main preoccupation here isn’t social commentary. It’s more to do with what distinguishes human beings in a world of increasingly clever and sentient machines. If we can programme a machine to love and to feel pity, what makes a human a human? Maybe it isn’t the capacity to love that makes us unique, but the ability to inspire love in others …

Klara and The Sun, written in that deceptively simple, crystal-clear prose familiar to anyone who knows Ishiguro’s novels, is unsettling and captivating. I’m not sure that it’s the masterpiece that many reviewers have said it is, but it’s certainly as thought-provoking as anything I’ve read for a long time.

The painters from the so-called School of London have been getting a lot of expert biographical attention in recent years. William Feaver’s hefty two-volume life of Lucian Freud was completed not long ago and now we have 800+ pages from Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan devoted to Francis Bacon. Francis Bacon: Revelations fills an important gap, sitting as it does between the gossipy, somewhat lurid accounts of Bacon’s life written in the past by friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on, and the more academic accounts of his work by art historians.

No biography, even one this painstaking and thorough, can capture completely an artist or a man as complex as Bacon. Inevitably questions remain, most particularly for me around the circumstances, starting in the 1940s, that propelled Bacon, almost entirely self-taught as an artist, from an interior designer of no real accomplishment to one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. No doubt Bacon benefited from the support of powerful patrons and fellow painters like Graham Sutherland, but what remains mysterious and remarkable (at least for me) is how Bacon’s extraordinary and singular artistic vision appeared to grow and flourish in such unpromising soil in the 1930s and 1940s.

Stevens and Swan previously wrote a much-lauded and prize winning biography of De Kooning (which I haven’t read). Francis Bacon: Revelations only enhances their reputations. Achieving the right balance between work and life is always difficult, but is especially so with an artist like Bacon who lived long enough to become something of an art celebrity and whose life and relationships attracted perhaps excessively salacious attention in the years immediately after his death. Stevens and Swan put the focus where it belongs – on those brilliant paintings. Bacon’s life – the troubled and sickly childhood, the masochistic personal relationships, and the wide circle of friends and sycophants – is here in all its color, as it should be, but it never obscures (and often illuminates) the genius behind the works. Having said that, I ended the book feeling that Bacon’s complex and troubled personality had eluded his biographers, just as it had almost everyone who knew him or thought they knew him. That’s not intended to be a criticism of what I think is a superb biography. It’s merely a reflection of how well Bacon hid from others and from himself.

I don’t tend to read the copy written on a book’s cover flap. Now I remember why. Having finished The Art of Falling, I flipped to the cover to read that Danielle McLaughlin’s debut novel “reveals profound truths about love, power, and the secrets that define us.” That’s just silly and pretentious. The novel does nothing of the kind. It’s a competent enough novel written by an author at the beginning of her career, who in all likelihood is embarrassed by such inflated claims.

The novel tells the story of a curator and her relationship with a famous artist’s surviving family. As she negotiates the acquisition of the artist’s studio, questions arise about who owns a celebrated sculpture. In the background, the curator faces domestic upheaval – a cheating husband, a truculent teenage daughter, and the arrival on the scene of a former lover. That sounds promising, doesn’t it? While there’s no denying McLaughlin’s ambition as she explores ideas about the permanence and ownership of artworks and notions of faithfulness and betrayal, the whole thing never comes together or fulfills its promise for the simple reason that it’s difficult to care for any of the characters or their particular stories.