The latest paperbacks reviewed.
Field Study, Rachel Seiffert, Vintage, £6.99
Borders, walls, crossings - appropriately for stories written largely in Berlin, these are key elements in Rachel Seiffert's new collection. A historical perspective is one of the qualities that distinguish Seiffert on Granta's list of Best Young British Novelists, where she was placed after the success of her Booker-shortlisted The Dark Room. Also distinctive is her calm, unshowy style; while the material ranges across continents and eras, the characters, from an isolated beekeeper in eastern Europe to dislocated English families to a successful architect suddenly undermined by self-doubt, all have a solidity rooted in Seiffert's careful observation. As the scientist does in the title story, Seiffert collects the samples, weighs the evidence and avoids jumping to conclusions, and the results, though often unexpected, are entirely convincing.
Giles Newington
The Mystery of Olga Chekova Anthony Beevor Penguin, £8.99
Post-revolutionary Russia: a beautiful young woman, niece of the brilliant playwright, Anton Chekov, escapes the chaos for Nazi Berlin, where she becomes an actor and Hitler's favourite cinema star. She also works as a Soviet spy, passing on information to Stalin himself about top-brass Nazis. Sounds good, doesn't it? And yet this story of Olga Chekova is strangely unsatisfying. Beevor's efforts to tie down his chimerical subject are constantly frustrated because there are simply too many myths, diversions and lies, many propagated by Olga herself. What saves the book is the fascinating historical backdrop and Olga's gifted relatives and friends: people such as Lev Knipper, composer and spy; Olga Knipper-Chekhova, actress and wife of Anton Chekov; and Konstantin Stanislavsky, director of the Moscow Art Theatre and creator of The Method.
Ken Walshe
The Catalpa Tree, Denyse Devlin Penguin, £6.99
Years after the death of her mother, her father's tragic accident leaves Jude orphaned at the age of 14. Without family to take her in, and by her father's prior arrangement, Jude is left in the care of Oliver, her father's best friend, whom she has known all her life. Their friendship changes into guardianship and guidance through adolescence for Jude, and parenthood for Oliver. Alongside Oliver's success as an author and failure as a husband comes Jude's growth into a headstrong and vibrant young woman. Lovers enter and leave their lives, but Oliver and Jude remain attached to each other in an ever-developing bond; both struggling with the relationship, neither quite able to survive without the other. This is a compelling tale of heartache and indiscretions, of love and the ties that bind people through a lifetime.
Claire Looby
They Were Counted, Miklós Bánffy, Translated by Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen, Arcadia Books,£14.99
Without a smigdin of irony the author, a Hungarian count, tells the pacy story of Transylvania's pre-first World War high society. In succulent noblesse oblige tones this first book of a trilogy immerses the reader in the life, loves and longings of two aristocrats: the socially responsible Count Balint Abady, who aptly foils the equally sympathetic, musically talented and mildly dissolute Count Lazlo Gyeroffy. Shooting parties, balls, duels, seductions and suicides are played out against irredentist longings for the lost territory of those great wooded, wolf-inhabited regions of Transylvania which underpin the work. The book itself has an interesting history - acclaim in the 1930s followed by a communist ban and, finally, a fresh translation in the 1980s - recounted in the introduction and foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor and Patrick Thursfield.
Kate Bateman
The Stories of English, David Crystal, Penguin, £ 8.99
Crystal's book is an attempt to present an alternative history of the English language to what has become know as "the standard version". The standard version, first promulgated in the 18th and 19th centuries by men such as Thomas Sheridan, Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray, sought to confine the language to a set of very specific rules. As Crystal points out, such an approach sought to exclude rather than include and, in keeping with the times, was connected to ideas of power, class and empire. In contrast to this narrow focus, Crystal shows that right from the very beginning, the defining feature of the English language was its ability to absorb other influences and that this mutability is key to its present-day position as a lingua franca. Overall, this is a fascinating study crammed with detail and insight which offers the reader an invaluable storehouse of knowledge.
Ken Walshe
The Mapmaker's Wife, Robert Whitaker, Bantam, £7.99
In this exhaustively researched book, Robert Whitaker recounts the remarkable tale of a French scientific expedition to colonial Peru in 1735 in order to resolve the great academic argument of the day: was the Earth pointy at the poles (as Descartes would have it) or did it flatten at the poles and bulge at the equator (Newton's contention)? Led by 34-year-old Enlightenment scientist Charles Marie de la Condamine, the expedition unfolds against the cultural, social and political backdrop of 18th-century European colonialism in South America. Whitaker brilliantly evokes a time and place on the cusp of the modern world, yet exotic and distant, violent and beautiful, in myriad ways. The romance hinted at in the title (between one of the group and a Peruvian girl) reads rather like a postscript, but those in search of a brilliantly paced adventure story could hardly do better.
John Lane