This weeks paperbacks
Then Again: Travels in Search of My Younger Self
Irma Kurtz
Fourth Estate, £7.99
In what is both a memoir and a travel book, Cosmopolitan's agony aunt retraces the journey she first made around Europe as a young American undergraduate. Fifty years older and wiser, she talks to her young self - and to the reader - affectionately, sometimes sternly, but always with a wry wit that keeps sentimentality well at bay. While the older Irma is astute and unshockable from years of living and agony aunting, her younger self's diary entries reveal a perky, intelligent young woman falling completely and irreparably in love with Europe. What's wonderful about the diary quotes is that they give genuine glimpses of the places as they were when "the transformation of the European continent into a theme park had barely begun". Lyrical, but also terse and truthful, Kurtz's prose resonates back and forth through the decades.
Cathy Dillon
Mailman
J.Robert Lennon
Granta, £7.99
Spare a thought for the mailman, a figure of trust and old-time reliability. Enter Albert Lippincott, with more than 30 years in the employ of the United States Postal Service. Efficient, eager, he sorts his deliveries, drives his van and gets that letter to your front door - the catch is, he might also read it, Xerox it and file away the copy. Poor divorced, dropout Albert, unloved son of a cold mother who still wants to be a cabaret star and brother to a disturbed failed actress sister, remains, at 57, the bright boy who never grew up. As the novel opens he is on edge, desperate to be the 10th caller on a radio quiz show. The prize is only a breakfast voucher, but Mailman wants to win so bad it hurts. Strong comic set-pieces abound in this very funny, very sad story about an intelligent, believable, doomed and needy Everyman battling his powerful, weighty fear.
Eileen Battersby
Child Star
Matt Thorne
Phoenix, £6.99
Dumped by his depressive girlfriend and stuck in a boring job, the stubbornly unexcitable Gerald Wedmore decides to take stock. Now aged 25, he feels nothing much has happened to him since a brief moment of fame in a reality-based teen soap opera a decade earlier, which coincided with a crisis in his parents' marriage. Moving between Gerald's current existence in a shared London house and his previous life on TV, Matt Thorne's novel toys with a number of potentially interesting themes and characters but doesn't do much with them. The teenage sections are the more poignant, as the lonely Gerald tries to interest his mother in his work or waits in the car while his dad visits his mistress, all the while using the TV show to create a substitute family. But as story and series plod on, it gradually becomes clear that beneath the still surface of Thorne's prose few surprises are waiting.
Giles Newington
Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger
Nigel Slater
Harper Perennial, £7.99
Never judge a book by, in this case, a title you'd expect on the smorgasbord of the cookery section. Instead, this memoir of an English suburban 1960s childhood has become a runaway bestseller. Slater vividly evokes the era of prawn cocktail, gammon steak with pineapple rings and Black Forest gateau served from a hostess trolley the size of a forklift truck. You might think "good riddance", but there's nowt so queer as nostalgia. There's even been some loose talk, from people who really should know better, of a Proust for our times. Billy Bunter more like, as Nigel scoffs the lot - from Walnut Whips to Fray Bentos pies - and still wants Angel Delight. Also hungry for love, he's devoted to you know who. Ah yes, in the kitchen department a boy's heart belongs to Mummy. Slater ends as adulthood and sophistication beckon, so expect a sequel. Croque-monsieur?
Michael Parsons
Barry Humphries
My Life As Me
Penguin, £7.99
The second (and counting) autobiography from Barry Humphries details the comic's middle-class upbringing, his burgeoning eccentricities and his progression to worldwide fame through the personages of Dame Edna, Sandy Stone and Les Patterson. A notorious vaudevillian, being taken seriously is something Humphries has avoided all his life. Yet here, he does betray a sort of longing for respect. Unimagined sides to the likes of Peter Cook, Spike Milligan, John Betjeman, Alec Guinness, Gore Vidal, Malcolm Muggeridge, Stephen Spender (Humphries is married to the poet's daughter, Lizzie) are revealed in sometimes tragic, often hilarious vignettes. The private life of a comic is often an unfunny affair. Not so for Humphries, who has avoided the unhappiness of many comedians, and has here fashioned a story full of beauty and artistry.
John Lane
The Light of Day
Graham Swift
Penguin, £7.99
George Webb is a policeman turned private investigator whose work, as with the great noir detectives of the 1930s and 1940s, centres around "matrimonial disputes". Hired by Sarah Nash to spy on her cheating husband, his actions - and inaction - lead to Tom's murder and her incarceration. Two years later, George recalls the events of those fateful weeks as he drives towards prison to visit Sarah, with whom he has fallen in love. This is an unsettling, hypnotic novel, with mysteries at the centre that only begin to unravel the closer George gets to the jail. Questions of innocence and responsibility are raised, not just in relation to the case, but to George's past, his dismissal from the force and his own failed marriage. Obsession clouds his thoughts, which echo the claustrophobia of Sarah's imprisonment. This disturbing novel leaves the reader with a worry regarding the things we do in the name of love.
John Boyne