A desperate hunt for his daughter’s mum in this weeks retros: THE RIDERS by Tim Winton, THE GREEN YEARS by A. J. Cronin, FREEZING POINT by Anders Bodelsen

THE RIDERS – Tim Winton (Picador £10.99, 368 people)

Optimistic Scully, 30, is attractive despite her educated background, doing manual labor to support her artist wife Jennifer and their young daughter Billie.

When Jennifer falls in love with an abandoned cottage in rural Ireland, she and Billie return to Australia to sell their house, while Scully begins renovations with the ingenious help of the local postman.

But when Billie returns alone and mute, Scully becomes obsessed with finding Jennifer, dragging the child across Europe to her old haunts. Did he really know his wife? So how much will he pay to track her down?

Beautifully written in 1994, this portrait of the father-daughter relationship is heartbreaking and uplifting. There will be a movie starring Brad Pitt soon. . .

GREEN YEARS By AJ Cronin (Pan £10.99, 320pp)

Scottish doctor Cronin is best known for his 1937 novel The Citadel, which was set in a Welsh mining village and inspired the founding of the NHS, but here he returns to his Scottish roots.

Following the deaths of his parents, eight-year-old Roman Catholic Robert is brought from Dublin to live with his mother’s family in sectarian Scotland.

Her grandmother is kind and her grandfather is a miser of money, but it is her womanizing, hard-drinking great-grandfather who she shares a special bond with for 12 years. The characterization is rich and entertaining, but despite the tragedy, it is the unlikely, intergenerational love that triumphs in this touching story from 1944.

FREEZING POINT By Anders Bodelsen (Faber £9.99, 192pp)

First released in 1969, this dystopian Danish thriller feels unnervingly contemporary, with its driverless cars, wall-sized televisions, and obsession with escaping aging and death. Magazine editor Bruno is diagnosed with terminal cancer, but is offered the chance to be ‘frozen’ until a cure is found.

He agrees, but when he ‘dissolves’ in 1995 he is kept in isolation and tormented by existential questions about what life is ‘for’.

He is frozen again and reemerges in 2022, when the world is ruled by medical professionals who can ‘live’ forever. This book, full of challenging ideas, is as chilling as its name suggests.