Lights Out for the Terri- tory, by Iain Sinclair (Granta, £7.99 in UK)

Iain Sinclair does for London what the "random" button on the CD player does for an over-familiar CD: smashes it to pieces and reassembles the fragments in an unsettling combination of the comfortable and the totally weird. He begins with a series of walks in north London, his crazy-paving routes dictated by the presence or absence of graffiti; he ends with a wide-ranging discussion of fictional representations of the city; in between, magpie musings on the role of the pit bull terrier in contemporary urban culture rub shoulders with spooks, gangsters, book-barrow men and a surreal visit to Jeffrey Archer's offices in the absence of, but with the full permission of, their owner. This is not an easy book to get into; but once you do, you'll never want to get out of it again.