Set largely in the elegant city of Geneva in the mid-1930s, Belle du Seigneur is a terrifying and seductive novel, comic in form and deadly serious in its deflation of the common pieties. Adrian Deume is an aspirant 'B' in the sprawling bureaucracy of the League of Nations, and also the head of the ghastly Deume clan, portrayed in a brilliantly sustained commentary on middle-class manners. Then there is a generous helping of the 'Valiant', a squabbling quintet who stand, in comic invention, somewhere between Baron Munchhausen and the Marx Brothers. These distinct worlds have a common centre: Solal, Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations. A Mediterranean Jew blessed with great gifts and cursed by crippling idealism, he sees all too clearly that international understanding is eternally undermined by personal and national interests. But it is his affair with Ariane Deume that finally precipitates his fall. He rejects the world and attempts to achieve through love the Absolute which he craves. But it is the eternal contradiction that perfection, once achieved, cannot endure, and Cohen leads him to his fate with a unique brand of teasing, clear-eyed pessimism.

Harriet Rose, 26, is an American photographer just winning recognition for her work. A travel fellowship brings her to visit her best friend and former roommate, Anne Gordon, in Switzerland. In an ongoing letter to her boyfriend, Harriet reports on strange developments in Anne's life, most notably her affair with a much older married man, which seems to be leading to a disastrous conclusion. Before she can rescue Anne, events take a series of unexpected turns, and Harriet must reexamine her own life and past, and come to terms with the difficulties and possibilities of human relationships. Already excerpted in The New Yorker, Katharine Weber's witty first novel of attraction and deception, a tale with the sensibility of a Margaret Atwood, pulses with cultural references and word games that echo Nabokov.

As events switch between London and Switzerland, Jacobson introduces us to a host of vivid and extraordinary characters. Most notable amongst these is London-born Timothy Fogel, a child with the wilful belief that he has been endowed with special powers. As events unfold it becomes apparent that this belief has cataclysmic implications for all involved. The Wonder-worker is a remarkable and evocative novel about obsession, passion and the extraordinary power of the human imagination.