In brief: My Roman Year; Madwoman; Mapping the Darkness – review

My Roman Year André Aciman Faber, £22, pp368

It was in 1966 that Call Me By Your Name author Aciman first arrived in Italy. Just a teenager, he was responsible for his deaf mother and a younger brother after their expulsion, along with other Jews and foreigners, from Alexandria. In Rome, impulsive, bullying Uncle Claude sublets them a shabby flat in a neighbourhood bearing no resemblance to the imperial wonders of Aciman's imagination. Even so, it's his slow appreciation of the city that shapes this transporting coming-of-age memoir in which beauty and the anguish of exile and displacement are rendered with the same sensuous, questing intensity that characterises his fiction.

Chelsea Bieker Oneworld, £16.99, pp336

Married mother of two Clove is living the ultimate "grammable" life in Portland, Oregon, all organic wellness supplements and ethically made #cottagecore dresses. She's also a thwarted writer but her greatest work of fiction, it turns out, is the self she presents not just to her followers but to her husband and young children – the self she constructed after fleeing home at 17. The strain is already showing when a letter from a women's prison arrives, providing the catalyst for a true-crime-style plot into which Bieker folds themes of domestic violence and inherited trauma. Suspenseful and satisfying.

Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep Kenneth Miller Oneworld, £10.99, pp352 (paperback)

As areas of scientific study go, the exploration of sleep is still relatively new, its roots stretching back little more than a century – this, despite the fact that we spend roughly a third of our lives asleep. To illuminate its important evolution, journalist Miller focuses on four pioneers, among them Nathaniel Kleitman , who fled pogroms in Russia and undertook immersive studies requiring him to stay awake for 115 hours and live in a cave for a month. It's an enlightening story, ably told.