Mr Toppit
By Charles Elton
Viking £12.99, 343 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

The Wilderness
By Samantha Harvey
Jonathan Cape £16.99, 328 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Family Planning
By Karan Mahajan
Chatto & Windus £12.99, 271 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

The identity crisis is one of literature’s most enduring themes, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Charles Elton continues the tradition with his engaging family saga Mr Toppit. Luke Hayman’s problem is that everyone thinks they know him. But they don’t. They know his alter ego, Luke Hayseed – a fictional character created by his author father, Arthur, in a series of children’s books.

Luke is burdened by his immortalisation. He feels that there is no truth in the stories purportedly about him: “The fact is, Luke Hayseed, c’est moi, and even I do not know where it all comes from, all that stuff in the books.”

After Arthur dies, his books become a publishing phenomenon. Luke and his family must deal with fame and fortune. But things take a dark turn when one of Arthur’s characters – a murky authoritarian figure called Mr Toppit – becomes real for one of them.

A very different identity crisis drives the plot of Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness. Widower Jake is a sixtysomething architect. One evening he looks at the blueprints for a building and has no idea what to do with them. He is forgetting words and names too. Worst of all, his memories of his wife, Helen, are slipping. As chapters alternate between Jake’s befuddled present and the bright, primary colours of his past, this novel works in opposition to traditional narratives. The lucidity of the beginning unravels into a shadowy blur, as “everything loses, rather than gains, order”. This is a finely written ode to memory, identity and love.

Karan Mahajan’s Family Planning hits a different note altogether. A gentle satire of modern Indian family and political life, it tells the story of Mr Ahuja, minister for urban development, and his dysfunctional family in Delhi. The manipulative patriarch has a secret to reveal to Arjun, the eldest of his 13 children. His teenage first born, meanwhile, is more concerned with impressing a girl on the bus with his budding rock star status. This is a bittersweet comedy set in a thoroughly 21st-century subcontinent.