This Is Not Who I Am: Our Authenticity Obsession by Emily Bootle is published by Ortac Press (£10.99). Ogden illustrates, elegantly and authoritatively, why we should be looking at those “blurriest, fleetest experiences”, and sticking with them. And yet, as she writes, while “it can be good to attend to moments of passion, clarity, revelation, ecstasy, discovery”, we must also recognise how fleeting they are. Not all our problems can be blamed on the relentlessness of our online lives – but I have found undeniably that the more I become absorbed by social media the more I feel I should be having what Ogden describes as “lightning flashes” of intensity and clarity all the time. Unknowing is not a problem to be solved but a necessary state: it serves the present not as “the defensiveness of wilful ignorance but the defencelessness of not knowing yet”. Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing: How to Love and other essays is providing me with rich material on why emotional grey areas are worth looking towards and embracing in their own right. Ultimately, both characters end up embarking on exercises in avoidance, embroiled in quests for certainty to quell feelings that are essentially unsolvable. Both novels are about ageing women who find themselves preoccupied, in some way, with death. Not least for its frequent invocations of William Blake, Death In Her Hands has strong parallels with another of my favourites of recent years: Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. This is a story about stories: primarily the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of what happens to us. Here, the blurriness comes in the form of the murder that the protagonist sets out to solve after finding a mysterious note in the woods, with a backdrop of pine needles, plain bagels and memories of a belittling husband (it is punctuated occasionally with the familiar warm lick of her dog, who is unconcerned with this not-quite-real detective work).

Though there is less of the outright self-absorbed irony of her millennial favourite, My Year of Rest and Relaxation – a book that hugely appealed to me, being an ironically self-absorbed millennial myself – in Death in Her Hands there is the same slow character unravelling, the same uneasy stream of consciousness. Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands has provided some slow-burning, mind-bending light fantasy in recent weeks.

Rachel cusk new novel