Convention demands that fiction is reviewed without reference to its creator’s life. But it’s impossible to ignore the background to David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (Penguin, £7.99). Twenty-nine years ago the author’s father killed himself. Vann’s extraordinary book suggests a writer who has been making sense of this act of self-destruction ever since.

The six connected short fictions centre on Jim, a womanising Alaskan dentist, and his troubled, gun-loving son, Roy. Jim dreams of a frontiersman’s life, taking Roy to live on a deserted island. Yet his admiration for pioneer self-sufficiency barely hides a lack of inner resources. In this, he echoes that famous American suicide, Willie Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

Reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Vann’s prose is as pure as a gulp of water from an Alaskan stream. Roy is torn between the desire to protect and be protected by this man-child; filial love is balanced by concern that he is destined to become his father. Vann shockingly makes this fear flesh in the central novella “Sukkwan Island”, which brilliantly explodes the idea that we are simply reading a disguised memoir.

Mortality is also at the heart of two other new debuts. The Well and the Mine (Virago, £11.99) by Gin Phillips is a Faulknerian melodrama set in Depression-era Alabama. Nine-year-old Tess witnesses a nameless woman throw a baby into a well. Phillips provides all one might expect of this earnest formula. Family secrets? Tick. Muggy summer nights thick with promise? Tick. Grinding rural poverty – squirrel stew, anyone? – viewed though a prism of nostalgia? Double tick this box. It will sell.

More entertaining is Victor Lodato’s Mathilda Savitch (Fourth Estate, £14.99). Faced with her parents’ glacial grief, the schoolgirl narrator seeks the truth about her sister’s death. Who was the mysterious stranger who apparently pushed her in front of a train?

Set in a US where terrorist atrocities have become an everyday concern, the book ambitiously tries to draw a parallel between adolescent anxiety and that of an American nation fearing terrorism and “the other”.

It doesn’t quite succeed. No matter: Mathilda Savitch is a joyous addition to a dynasty of sharp-tongued fictional teens that stretches back to Holden Caulfield, and Lodato’s novel should have wide appeal.

Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Book Festival