A selection of the latest paperbacks reviewed
No One Belongs Here More than You, By Miranda July, Canongate, £7.99
AT FIRST glance, performance artist and film-maker Miranda July's debut collection of short fiction appears to be yet another addition to the canon of self-consciously quirky young American writers.
But there's a genuine oddness and sweetness in these small but perfectly formed tales that lifts them above the usual tired McSweeney's fare.
July writes with strangely distant compassion about her lonely, disconnected characters: a middle-aged woman who dreams of meeting Prince William; a sad old man who falls in love with the idea of his colleague's sister; a young woman who can't live without her best friend.
July is at her best when she lets her imagination run wild, as in This Person, in which a woman discovers that everything that ever happened to her was a test, and now every single person she ever met has gathered to tell her how wonderful she is. Enchanting. - Anna Carey
Seizure, Erica Wagner, Faber, £7.99
Unaware until now of each other's existence, two half-siblings meet for the first time in a remote cottage in the north of England.
The encounter is brought about by the death of their mother, a woman mistakenly believed long dead.
It is a haunting story, and a story of haunting. Both characters are stalked by ghosts of their past, most acutely by the beloved and elusive mother.
A brooding, amoral hunger seems to filter through from the bleak landscape outside. With an intriguing if sometimes jarring mesh of first- and third-person narrative, Wagner conjures two stories of obsession and loss up to their point of convergence.
Momentum and intensity build so that the unnerving denouement, when it comes, seems almost inevitable, as her characters are thrust down a route of destruction reminiscent of Greek tragedy. A searing debut novel. - Claire Anderson-Wheeler
Every Move You Make, By David Malouf, Vintage, £7.99
Sure-footed in his understanding of Australia's persona, caught as it is between the influences of the Mother Country and its brasher, independent, pioneering self, Malouf is Patrick White's natural successor.
Of the seven often vibrant, very fine stories in this volume, two are outstanding, and take different responses to death as their theme.
In Elsewhere, Andy is nominated to accompany his wife's father to the funeral of her sister. Andy realises he is now about the same age as the old man was when the dead woman was born.
In the daring title story, an obsessive romantic who has finally caught her dream man, only to lose him in an accident, watches his younger brother grieving at his graveside, and stumbles upon something about real love.
Memory is central in Malouf's fiction, as is his feel for history. Throughout these stories his gaze is directed firmly at ordinary lives lived in the present. - Eileen Battersby
Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global, By Paul Mason, Vintage, £8.99
Mason, using an impressive range of primary sources, recounts nine of the great stories of working-class revolts, from the Manchester silk workers of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 to the Jewish Bund, the General Union of Jewish Workers, before the second World War.
His accounts of the silk weavers' revolt in Lyon in 1831 and of the Paris Commune of 1871 are particularly enthralling.
Mason prefaces each of the nine chapters with an account of his own trips to modern-day scenes of workers' struggle: from the indomitable endurance of Bolivian tin-miners high in the Andes to the extraordinary bravery of the non-sectarian union organisers in Basra, Iraq.
His thesis, sketchily argued in the book, is that today, in an era of globalisation, a global labour movement will emerge, learning from the lessons of working-class history.
The book is best read instead as a series of "micro-histories", in the style of Edward Thompson's 1963 classic, The Making of the English Working Classes. - Tom Moriarty
Talleyrand: Betrayer and Saviour of France, By Robin Harris, John Murray, £10.99
Do we want yet another book on Prince Talleyrand? This particular effort differs from its predecessors in that Harris is of the firm opinion Talleyrand was one of the most revolting human beings to have besmirched the late 18th and early 19th century.
Yet for all Talleyrand's many faults, the reader may (just about) hold a sneaking admiration for him. He was at one stage Napoleon's successful political adviser until they fell out, Napoleon referring to him as "a shit in a silk stocking".
Napoleon wanted war, Talleyrand peace. Their relationship was said to be "mutually faithless".
Talleyrand was a long- serving politician and diplomat who profoundly influenced the destiny of the French Revolution and, ultimately, in his old age, became a progressive, "world-class" statesman.
If you enjoy reading of success achieved through lying, thieving, corruption and Machiavellian schemes, then this is for you. It is scrupulously researched and the author tries to be fair. He dislikes Talleyrand; many readers may not. - Owen Dawson