A selection of paperbacks reviewed
The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street
Charles Nicholl
Penguin, £8.99
In 1612, at the Court of Requests, a man seeks a promised dowry from Christopher Mountjoy, his tightfisted father-in-law. In the surviving records is the deposition of the Mountjoy's former lodger - "one Mr Shakespeare". Nicholl attempts to relocate the playwright during his residence on Silver Street. The result is a sprawling investigation with more self-described "hunches" than facts: it is impossible to know the "facts" of Shakespeare's lodgings, but Nicholl's depth of inspection is so often paired with quotations from the man himself, that we are reminded that the plays and poems should not be divested of personal meaning - doing so "makes them a bloodless set of literary variations, which they are palpably not". - Emily Firetog
The Outcast
Sadie Jones
Vintage, £7.99
In this novel, which was shortlisted for this year's Orange prize, Jones successfully evokes the stifling, repressive atmosphere of an English village during a hot summer after the second World War. As it opens, the main character, Lewis, is returning from a two-year stint in Brixton prison. He is 19 and lost - emotionally maimed by the death of his mother when he was a child, unable to connect with his distant father. He cannot close his eyes to the hypocrisies and the small-mindedness of his neighbours and they are none too keen on him and his unpredictability. His only ally is 15-year-old Kit, who herself is struggling in a family whose reality is as damaging as its exterior is respectable. Jones calmly allows events to unfold, describing both rural beauty and domestic turmoil in prose that is clear and spare as a summer lake, and offering a welcome puff of hope at the end. Cathy Dillon
After This
Anne McDermott
Bloomsbury, £7.99
National Book Award winner, Alice McDermott here dissects late 20th-century America via John Keane, a haunted second World War veteran, and his wife, Mary, who together raise a family of four children - Jacob, Michael, Annie and Claire - in post-war America. Jacob is sent off to Vietnam, Michael and Annie embrace the social and sexual revolution of the 1960s and Clare struggles to maintain a semblance of purity in a radically changing landscape. McDermott uses the complexities of family relationships and development to reveal the impact of history on concepts of humanity and nationhood. She lays bare the nuances of family life, of the thin fabric of the American dream and the one thing that still holds it together - love. Tom Cooney
Our Own Piece of Paris
Ellie Nielsen
Atlantic Books, £7.99
If Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence had been lived by Bridget Jones in Paris, it might have gone something like this. A long-time addict of Paris, Nielsen and her husband and six-year-old son arrived from Melbourne one summer on an unlikely mission: find an affordable Parisian dream home in two weeks. She tells her story of flat-hunting in the French capital with breezy charm and a good measure of self-deprecating wit. Bewildering encounters with bewildering red tape and snooty Parisians, and comic instances of culture clash, are related with zest. The anecdotes will appeal to those who have undertaken similar house-hunting quests abroad. It will probably also draw sniggers from all who have ever tried to get any species of transaction done in Paris. However, her energetic, amusing narration may not be enough to sustain the interest of readers who do not share comparable experiences. Claire Anderson-Wheeler
The Ministry of Special Cases
Nathan Englander
Faber£7.99
Kaddish Pozan, the son of a whore and a social pariah, makes his living erasing names from old gravestones in 1970s Argentina for socially conscious Jews, desperate to eradicate nominal connections to their families' unsavoury pasts. The embarrassment of the past, however, soon gives way to the terrifying reality of the present: a change in political regime - the junta's 1976 "Dirty War" - yields a world of ID cards, military checkpoints, whitewashed walls, and disappearances. When Kaddish's son is "disappeared", he and his wife, Lillian, embark on a Kafkaesque journey to find him. Beautifully written and at times hauntingly funny, Englander's tragic novel pits terror against hope, marking a parent's un-knowing as morally distinct from an unwillingness to know . Emily Firetog
The Book of Love: In Search of the Kamasutra
James McConnachie
Atlantic Books, £8.99
Scan the shelves of any bookshop and chances are you'll find the Kamasutra - not the original third-century Hindu text, but its modern incarnation, a fully-illustrated manual for the adventurous, the athletic or the merely curious. In this erudite, but unfortunately often dry study, James McConnachie attempts to explain the story behind the often misunderstood original, tracing the "transformation of the masterwork of erotic value into a mere rubric for sexual virtuosity". The entertaining story of its "discovery" by the West, in the shape of Victorian explorer Richard Burton, touches on everything from anthropology to censorship laws, but the modern perception of the Kamasutra is ultimately, McConnachie argues, a metaphor for imperialism, "a palace of pleasures, stripped down, shipped off, seen only in its splendid bedroom". Freya McClements