The latest paperback releases reviewed

February

Lisa Moore

Vintage, £7.99

Helen is an ordinary woman, not a hero, not a saint, but an insistently real Everywoman. She has been in mourning for 30 years, since her husband died in an oil-rig disaster when she was pregnant with their fourth child. Her memories are beginning to crowd into her head and dominate her thoughts. She remembers the night a phone call initially alerted her to the news reports. The Canadian writer Lisa Moore offers a devastating study of loneliness that is moving but never sentimental. Another late-night phone call comes, this time from Helen's adult son in need of advice. Set in Newfoundland, this 2011 Impac longlisted novel explores two sides of her persona: the girl she was when she married Cal at 20 and the widow she has been for most of her life. Now 56, she watches her grown daughters make their lives and wonders what happened to hers. Eileen Battersby

Just Kids

Patti Smith

Bloomsbury, £8.99

Patti Smith's account of her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as they traversed the vibrant, unbridled art and music scene of late 1960s/early 1970s New York is a sweeping, poetic masterpiece of its kind. From the raw depictions of derelict poverty and the ravages of the Aids virus that bookend her narrative to the uninhibited lyricism with which she details the young couple's passionate engagement with the artistic wonders of their newfound milieu, Smith brings to life a fleeting period in the United States' cultural history, as seen through the eyes of those most obsessively enamoured with it. Iconic figures – Jimi Hendrix, Sam Shepard – drift in and out of her story, brief but resonant influences, cast in a light refreshingly unburdened by the weight of history. It is this ability to speak with the voice of her idealistic younger self that allows Smith to convey the couple's limitless devotion with such hyperbolic beauty. Dan Sheehan

The Big Short

Michael Lewis

Penguin, £9.99

In 2006 a Mexican strawberry picker in California – pay: $14,000 a year; requirement to speak English: none – was loaned every penny he needed to buy a house for $724,000. It was a teaser mortgage, with repayments that started off low but soared after two years. So he'd need to refinance, thereby providing his broker with an extra fee and the finance house with another subprime loan to bundle with thousands of others, to be sliced and diced into ever more complex financial products that Wall Street would sell to investors who didn't realise they were buying packages of loans that were heading down the pan. Michael Lewis, whose Liar's Pokerlaid bare his experiences as a twentysomething bond salesman for Salomon Brothers in the 1980s, has written a similarly page-turning account of this more recent financial jiggery-pokery. It has a familiar ring: a market bubble, avaricious bankers, a reckless way of doing business. You won't understand every detail (or, as the author says, award yourself a gold star if you do), but then the details of these transactions were impenetrable even to experts. Designed to turn base metal into gold, they instead helped lead us into recession. Liam Stebbing

The Arabs: A History

Eugene Rogan

Penguin, £12.99

A comprehensive overview of the history of the Arab nations and people, Eugene Rogan's book is rewarding on two levels: as a straightforward chronological account of the Arabs and as a useful reference to be dipped into as required. There are, for instance, four references to Sudan – important and timely as southern Sudan chooses the democratic way to secession. Look up Saddam Hussein and you will find him, in March 1990, warning his fellow Arab leaders that for the next five years there would be only one true superpower: the United States. Published in hardback a year ago, this paperback edition includes all the original illustrations both in black and white and in colour. Kept on the bookshelf alongside Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation, which was published in 2005, Rogan's book will tell you everything you need to know about the Arabs. Mary Russell

Even the Dogs

Jon McGregor

Bloomsbury, £7.99

Robert is found dead in his filthy flat. He was an alcoholic who lived alone, his wife having given up on him. He stayed on, drinking and remembering – but usually forgetting. Later, in the morgue, he will be dismantled by pathologists determining the cause of death. In Robert's case it could be one of several. Except that he was not beaten. Those bruises and cuts are from falling about while he was drunk, which was often. A chorus of invisible mourners observe the proceedings and recall Robert's life, piecing together the past that has led to this present, this death. In his devastating, strangely graceful and beautiful third novel, the British writer Jon McGregor makes inspired use of an all-seeing chorus as narrative device, as did the US writer Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides(1993), and creates a masterful portrait of the forgotten people who exist on the edges of any society; the drunks, the addicts, the defeated. Eileen Battersby