A roundup of paperbacks
We Saw Spain Die
Paul Preston
Constable, £9.99
The heroism of war correspondents who risked life and limb so the world would know the truth is the over-riding theme of this superbly researched body of work. Revisiting the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939, Preston salutes the journalists who battled to get their stories published amid fascist propaganda and state censorship. Incidental anecdotes add colour throughout, including the time Ernest Hemingway challenged an army commander to a game of Russian roulette to defend a woman's honour. A gripping, blood-drenched tome, We Saw Spain Die captures the furious cacophony of war through the eyes of the correspondents who wrote the first draft of history. Most emotionally affecting are George Steer's account of the bombing of Guernica and Jay Allen's reporting of the Badajoz massacre, in which Franco's troops executed 1,800 prisoners in a bullring. Kevin Cronin
Liberation: Europe 1944-1945
William I Hitchcock
Faber, £9.99
For continental Europeans, liberation from Nazi control "came hand in hand with unprecedented violence and brutality". Hitchcock gives voice to some of those Europeans in this thoroughly researched and clearly written book. Some 20,000 civilians were killed during the struggle for Normandy alone, mostly by Allied bombing. Allied armies made little effort to spare civilian lives, and the young American, British and Russian soldiers who defeated the Germans frequently abused their power, engaging in looting and rape. By 1945, half a million American soldiers had VD; military courts sentenced 151 to death for rape, but most whites were reprieved. Of the 29 executed, 25 were black. Ironically, the Allies treated the German civilians better than their French, Belgian, Dutch or Italian counterparts; as one GI put it, the Germans were "cleaner and a damn sight friendlier than the frogs". The book compellingly conveys the horror of war, especially from the civilian perspective. Brian Maye
The Other Half Lives
Sophie Hannah
Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99
There is a type of English thriller that has mushroomed into a sub-genre. It involves murder, often with some outlandish ritual thrown in. But instead of a more-or-less sympathetic detective at the centre of things, trying to solve the crime in the face of marital, digestive, or personal hygiene issues, this sub-genre features a tightly knit circle of ghastly characters, all of whom turn out to be related – or at least connected – to everyone else. In some cases, they turn out to actually be everyone else, which leaves the reader in a sinister soup of dislocation. The Other Half Livesis one such. It begins when a man tells his girlfriend he committed a murder; she, however, knows that the woman is still alive. How Sophie Hannah has managed to weave a full-length novel out of such a wafer-thin idea is quite beyond me. But then I can't see the point of this sub-genre, whose incestuous nastiness well outweighs – it seems to me – the undoubted ingenuity of the storytelling. Arminta Wallace
The Palace of Illusions
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Picador, £7.99
Panchaali is a captivating character whose life is recounted in the epic Hindu poem The Mahabharata, born of fire and destined to bring about the end of the "Third Age of Man" – somewhere between 5000 and 6000 BCE. In Divakaruni's retelling, Panchaali herself narrates a tale of mysticism, secrets and treachery, in which fate is inescapable and deities meddle in the lives of men. Following her unorthodox birth, Panchaali grows into a headstrong woman whose destiny dictates that she marries the five Pandava brothers, each the son of a god, but whose one true love is forever unrequited. Years of wealth and power are followed by degradation and humiliation, concluding in the savage war that lays waste to the land and leaves a million men dead. This spellbinding fairy tale is bursting with the images, scents and sounds of India, with all its contradictions: for every deprivation there is a startling wonder, and for every revelation of human character there is a question whose answer is out of reach. Claire Looby
The Great Crash
Selwyn Parker
Piatkus, £10.99
A lively and readable account of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the worldwide depression that followed, this book takes in parts of the world not usually covered in standard studies, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands and Scotland. The major political upheavals that resulted are covered, but so too are some of the individual tragedies, conveyed through moving personal testimonies. Leading political figures of the time, such as US treasury secretary Andrew Mellon and British chancellor of the exchequer Philip Snowden, made a bad situation worse. The major debate at the time was between liquidationists, who wanted to let the rotten parts of the economy die, and those who advocated massive spending to get the world economies going again. The same argument is echoed today. Parker believes we know a lot more today than we did in the 1930s, and aren't likely to repeat the mistakes made then. Hope he's right. Brian Maye