The latest paperbacks reviewed
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter Vintage, £7.99
As Carter herself makes clear, these are fairy stories you don't read your children. One of six volumes reissued by publishers Vintage, The Bloody Chamber - the late writer's best-known collection - offers a new and often disturbing twist on well-worn tales. A young bride must rely on her mother to save her from Bluebeard's axe, Puss in Boots is reinvented as a bawdy young lover, and Little Red Riding Hood ends up in bed with the big bad wolf. Darkly erotic and utterly captivating, this is a world of beautiful daughters, ineffectual fathers, and not-so-helpless virgins, where nothing is as it seems. From a necklace resembling an "extraordinarily precious slit throat" to teeth like "spikes of spun sugar", the luxurious vividness of Carter's language draws the reader, victim-like, into her world of vampires, werewolves and predatory Counts. Subversive yet seductive. Freya McClements
Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham Vintage Books, £8.99
There's nothing like reading about food to make you want, no make that need, to eat it, and for that reason you should keep a stack of takeaway menus by your side as you tuck into Lizzie Collingham's evocative history of India and its cuisine. This is a big-scale work, in which meticulous research marries with a light and engaging writing style to produce a rollicking good read, rather than the heavy, scholarly tome it could have been in less skilled hands. The regionality of Indian cooking is a recurring theme, and Collingham expands on this by tracing the passage of curry, in all its guises, to the four corners of the world. So, if you've ever wondered how chicken tikka masala became one of Britain's national dishes, you'll find the answer here. Recipes, photographs and illustrations add significantly to the mixture. Marie-Claire Digby
Kiss Me Like a Stranger by Gene Wilder HarperCollins, £7.99
Subtitled "My Search for Love and Art", Wilder's wryly touching memoir tends to focus more on the former than the latter. The actor is more interested in self-analysis than kiss-and-tell, however, and with four marriages - two of them failed - there's plenty to analyse. He writes with sympathetic exasperation about his third wife, Gilda Radner, the irrepressible, unstable American comedienne who died of ovarian cancer. The book concludes on an upbeat note after Wilder survives his own near-fatal bout with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He also provides amusing details about his early days with the Actors Studio and his breakthrough into movies, first in Bonnie and Clyde and followed later in 1967 by his Oscar-nominated starring debut in Mel Brooks's The Producers. But despite a few hits, including Young Frankenstein, Silver Streak and cult favourite Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Wilder never tried hard enough, and his film career petered out in the early 1990s. Kevin Sweeney
The WWW Club by Anita Notaro Bantam Books, £6.99
At a time when we are bombarded by reports of celebrities sporting tiny clothes and proudly showing off 23-inch waists, fact and fiction have so rarely swapped places with such fervour as here. This club, unlike those who shun food, celebrates it as a panacea in the hunt for a "man-pleasing" figure, but the love-hate relationship the four friends and members of the club enjoy with food only highlights their struggle with the pounds. The concept that only a thin body can be attractive is unfortunately glossed over in the attempt to empathise with the women's plight. In true Irish chick-lit fashion, the pals stand by each other through relationship crises and create yet another dieting fad in the process. Complete with tales of diets tried and failed, demanding children, drooling dogs and semi-mystery men, this is an easy, familiar read. Claire Looby
The Orientalist by Tom Reiss Vintage, £7.99
The orientalist of the title is Lev Nussimbaum, an Azeri Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and a bestselling author in Nazi Germany. "The reasons Muslims and Jews do not get along today seem obvious and inevitable. The reasons they once got along so well lie in the distance, on the other side of a historical chasm," writes Reiss, who then proceeds to bridge that chasm superbly. By the time he was 30, Nussimbaum had published 16 books, most of them international bestsellers, and one enduring masterpiece, Ali and Nino. His own life outdid his fantastic adventure stories: married to an international heiress and divorced in a tabloid scandal; closest friend in New York arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the US; invited to be Mussolini's official biographer until his "true" identity was discovered. Brian Maye
Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis Nicholas Stargardt Pimlico, £8.99
Much more than a witness to the vicissitudes of war, Stargardt's well-researched and bulky investigation of the lives, miseries and murder of children is told in tandem with the major events of the second World War. Drawing on welfare and medical records, memories, diaries, letters and drawings, the cornucopia of Europe's offspring - from Hitler Youth draft-dodgers who peddled food and contraband to the Sonderkommando apprentices who shovelled from the ashes the remains of their inheritance - is brought to life with imagination and insight. Written with ease and historical understanding, the narrative, indiscriminate in its sensitivity towards the many abused - from the willing cheerleaders of Nazism to the survivors of the concentration camps - tells a fascinating tale, most memorably in the words of the Anne Frank generation, caught in the tentacles of Nazism. Paul O'Doherty