The first novel from poet Jacob Polley, Talk of the Town (Picador, £9.99), is written in a Carlisle dialect as thick as fog, atop a Lake District fell. Once the linguistic mist clears, the novel emerges as a traditional coming-of-age tale about a teenage boy, Chris, searching for his missing best mate in a town full of thugs. Spanning 24 hours, with flashbacks, this tightly written yarn shifts impressively from light comedy to boy’s own adventure and finally something darker, as Chris is dragged reluctantly into manhood.

Polley’s hero is no model pupil but he sprinkles the everyday with a tough lyricism. His mum’s purse becomes “a brown bread roll, fulla cards and crispy receipts”, while a punch resounds with “the crack an apple meks when yer throw it hard against a wall”.

For Chris, the countryside, just beyond the town’s boundaries, represents both a threat and the promise of freedom.

In Gill Schierout’s The Shape of Him (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), South Africa’s mining country fulfils a similar function. For Schierout’s characters happiness is as rare and precious as the gems beneath the veldt. Stricken by a degenerative brain disease, diamond digger Herbert Wakeford has spent his last years in a remote mental institution. On the eve of his funeral in 1945, his former lover Sara, the manager of a Cape Town boarding house, recalls their life together.

What makes this novel so disarming is the figure of Herbert. A cipher whose personality is further eaten away by illness, his immense absence exerts irresistible gravitational force on both the flinty Sarah and Aloma Maggie, Herbert’s daughter by another woman. Written with an elliptical elegance reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, this is a strong debut about the grip of memory and the power of one life to impose itself upon another.

Themes of memory and absence also permeate Chloe Aridjis’s dreamlike Book of Clouds (Chatto & Windus £11.99), the tale of a young Mexican-Jewish woman adrift in Berlin. Employed to transcribe tapes for a historian writing a book about the German capital, Tatiana becomes increasingly obsessed by evidence of the city’s sinister past, from the ghost stations shut down when the Wall was built to an abandoned Stasi bowling alley.

I confess I didn’t buy the plot, which involves an irritatingly fey meteorologist obsessed with clouds, and a group of conveniently placed neo-Nazis. But as a study of a mind struggling to come to terms with where the self ends and the world begins, and a portrait of city where history intrudes painfully on every corner, Book of Clouds impresses.

Valeria’s Last Stand (Bloomsbury £14.99) offers a more light-hearted take on the post-Communist experience.

The premise is simple: when old battleaxe Valeria falls for the local potter, a small Hungarian village is thrown into chaos. Trouble is, Brooklyn-born Marc Fitten’s meringue-light first novel is so busy trying to charm with its portrayals of horny-handed yokels, it forgets to do much else. This is Don Camillo minus the political nous; Louis de Bernières without the sense of history. You wouldn’t bet against them selling the film rights, though.

Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Book Festival