An artist in her thirties weaves and unravels connections between the loom and the computer, DNA and technology, dreams and decisions Thread Ripper is a multi-strand novel about weaving, women, and programming. In Copenhagen, a tapestry-weaver embarks on her first big commission, a digitally woven tapestry. As she works, she draws illuminating connections between all the stuff that life is made from - DNA, plant tissue, algorithms, text and textile - and that which disrupts it - radiation, pests, entropy and doubt. In another strand, we follow Ada Lovelace, the 1830s mathematician and pioneer of computer programming. And Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus, who wove and unpicked a shroud to put off her 108 suitors. Contemplative yet clear-sighted, Amalie Smith's hybrid textile of a novel bares the aching but crucial interwovenness of art and life.

Recently unearthed from the ground, Marble leaves her new lover in Copenhagen and travels to Athens. The city is overflowing with colour, steam and fragrance, cats cry like babies at night, the economic crisis is raging. In this volatile landscape, Marble grasps the world by exploring its immediate surfaces. Capturing specks of colour on ancient sculptures in the Acropolis Museum with an infrared camera, she simultaneously traces the pioneering sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, who spent several months in the same place 110 years earlier. Far away from her husband and children, Carl-Nielsen showed that Archaic sculptures were originally painted in bright colours - a feat which meant defying Victorian gender roles and jeopardising her marriage. Sensuous and electric, yet admirably forensic in its approach to mineral life, Marble is a galvanizing novel about the materials life is made of, about korai and sponge diving, about looking and looking again, written in a spare and pellucid style.