Woody Allen's first novel in this week's literary fiction: WHAT'S WITH BAUM? by Woody Allen, HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT by Olga Tokarczuk, PICK A COLOUR by Souvankham Thammavongsa

WOODY Allen has out Woody Allened himself with his debut novel.

Asher Baum is a hypochondriacal Jewish New Yorker (sound familiar?) who pessimistically pontificates about everything from unusual moles to black holes.

Baum’s marriage has grown stale and he’s jealous of his stepson’s success as a novelist. Baum’s own writing is panned as whiny and pretentious.

When Baum is being interviewed by an attractive young woman he mistakes her praise as an invitation to kiss her – then discovers she is going to write him up as a sexual predator.

At first, one presumes the book will be a humorous take down of cancel culture, but instead Baum spends more time thinking about how to take down his smug stepson. As with any of Allen’s films it is an awfully fun ride.

YET again, Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk has produced a firework of a novel. Tokarczuk has never been frightened of straying into the strange and this book may be her wackiest yet.

It takes the form of a series of vignettes detailing the lives, deaths but mostly the dreams of the inhabitants of a small village in Poland.

Characters we meet along the way include a 15th-century transgender monk, a wise and wisened wig maker and a clairvoyant bank clerk.

Anything this unusual attempted by a lesser novelist would feel crude and knotty, but Tokarczuk’s genius makes this a truly spellbinding work. All the fragmented and shimmering parts come together as perfectly as the pieces in a kaleidoscope. Mesmerising and strange, putting down this book feels rather like waking up from a dream yourself.

WELCOME to Susan’s nail salon. Ning the narrator is a retired boxer. Noi the receptionist is a 19-year-old single mother. Mai the manicurist juggles dating with looking after her aged mother. But to the customers, they’re interchangeable servants, all called Susan.

Ning, the boss, insists that all her employees leave their names and identities at the door. While they scrub the feet and thread the eyebrows of their customers, the only occasion for expressing their true selves is wittily gossiping in their native language.

As they chatter, we are drip-fed vivid details of Ning’s loneliness and her storied past.

The immigrant experience and the tension between who we really are and the parts we’re forced to play is deftly explored in this triumphant debut.