Rupert Brooke left behind him far more than his poetry. His good looks were legendary and undisputed; more disputed, however, were his sexuality and the possibility that he fathered a daughter with a Tahitian woman.

In her novel The Great Lover (Sceptre, £12.99), Jill Dawson exploits these ambiguities to the full, creating a compelling, thoroughly plausible narrative that explores Brooke’s time as a student in Cambridge.

The book opens with an old lady, Nell Golightly, receiving a letter out of the blue from a Tahitian woman who claims to be the poet’s daughter, asking what he was like.

Nell’s written reply takes her back to her own youth, when she was a housemaid at the Orchard Tea Gardens in Grantchester, where Brooke was the new tenant. The story is told by both Nell and Brooke, and this not only makes for a wonderful tale of surreptitious attraction, but also gives us a look into Brooke’s life at Cambridge that is fictional yet based on fact, and takes us beyond to his journey through the South Pacific. Truly delectable.

We also get a sense of another time, another place, through Monique Roffey’s The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Simon & Schuster, £12.99). The place is Trinidad; the setting is contemporary, though it harks back to 50 years ago, when George and Sabine Harwood arrive in 1956, fresh from Britain. They arrive in January, the same month as the firebrand future leader Eric Williams launches a new political party, the People’s National Movement.

It’s an uncomfortable time for Britons in Trinidad as it moves towards independence. Sabine hates the heat and the racial tensions; George loves the heat, and ignores the tensions. Sabine, on her green bicycle, has a chance encounter with Williams, and begins to write secret letters to him, confiding all her hopes and fears that she cannot discuss with her husband.

The contemporary part of the story is not comfortable either. The Harwoods have stayed on in Trinidad, in a changed political and social climate — and a worsening marriage. When the son of their housekeeper is viciously beaten by the police, a chain of events start that include George’s discovery of his wife’s letters to Eric Williams — never sent.

It’s an unhappy chain of events, full of love, hatred, understandings and misunderstandings between husband and wife and between the races, but is, above all, a vivid portrait of this Caribbean island and the spell that it weaves.