This is really good – ‘drop everything’ kind of good.

Like Campbell’s previous novels, This Happy and We Were Young, it’s a relationship drama, but with a larger scope, enjoyably unpredictable.

It follows Lena, formerly a precocious folk singer, ejected from her band in murky circumstances. Now she’s in Dublin, raising a four-year-old who talks worryingly about a past life before she died.

That seems to be the novel’s key crisis, but halfway through the perspective splinters to follow Lena’s husband, his siblings and their mother, dipping into their pasts.

What begins as an intimate parenting psychodrama turns into a kind of intergenerational anatomy of Ireland as seen through the layered history of two families. It’s quietly brilliant: real, wise, never showing off the craft you sense thrumming away below the surface of every line.

Armstrong follows The Young Team, drawn on his past as a gang member, with this gleeful state-of-the-nation dystopia centred on post-industrial Scotland and filtered through the author’s love of electronic dance music.

Turbo, a small-time DJ, is clock-watching through his days as a data-entry clerk before he finds his calling at the head of an insurrection against a far-Right MP fomenting moral panic about rave culture.

Throughout there are regular shoutouts to Armstrong’s favourite tunes from a decade spent popping pills on dancefloors throughout the Noughties (he’s now drink and drug-free).

The high-stakes political urgency of his fragmentary vernacular narrative is a clever way to explore his feelings about coming late to a scene whose most controversial days took place well before he was born in 1991.

Pulitzer-winning Greer began his career writing serious-minded novels such as The Story Of A Marriage, about a love triangle crossing boundaries of race and sexuality in postwar America.

But with 2017’s hugely successful Less, a comedy about a writer on a book tour, he reinvented himself as US literature’s No 1 funny man.

He wrote this latest novel to cheer up readers daunted by the news agenda right now.

It’s a whimsical summertime caper about an American who winds up as a factotum for a nonagenarian noble hosting eccentric guests at her Tuscan villa.

Cue much caps-lock shouting in a laboured comedy of misunderstanding, full of barely veiled fawning over wealth and cultural capital.

The jokes are basic – you feel pandered to rather than respected.

Call me po-faced, but I’d rather have a good old doomscroll any night of the week.