The latest batch of paperbacks are reviewed.
Judge Savage. Tim Parks, Vintage, £6.99
Tim Parks, long-based in Italy, is the most unsung contemporary British novelist. No one could accuse him of cossetting his dislikable characters. Increasingly interesting for what he says rather than for the way he says it, he is always forthright. In this intelligent, blunt novel, Daniel Savage, the arrogant adopted mixed-race son of middle-class white English parents is now a judge. He has made effective political use of being not quite white. After years of sexual adventures, he is concentrating on his brittle, pathetic and very English wife, who has set about re-establishing their sex life with embarrassing gusto. Part of this new beginning is an expensive new house. Their daughter has decided to rebel, a former lover needs his help and a pushy neighbour wants sex. Truths begin to dribble, then gush out as Savage's smug life of lies falls apart. - Eileen Battersby
Mourning Ruby. Helen Dunmore, Penguin, £7.99
At the heart of Helen Dunmore's eighth novel lie two losses in the life of her narrator, Rebecca. As a baby she was abandoned by her mother and moved uneasily into adulthood surrounded by figures whom she "adopts" into her life: her husband, Adam; her friend Joe; a paternal employer whom she considers leaving. Rebecca has managed to survive this early loss but it is the second one, the tragic death of her daughter, Ruby, in a traffic accident, that brings devastation. Dunmore examines Rebecca's relationships with each of the significant people in her life in delicate prose, teasing unexpected stories from each character, never allowing the narrator's heartbreak to veer towards melodrama. Experimental in structure, this is a harsh but rewarding read which somehow manages to combine the poignancy of loss with the reality of acceptance. - John Boyne
Isaac Newton. James Gleick, Harper Perennial, £7.99
Once, every schoolchild believed that Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. Today's little tykes will probably be more interested in calculating how much "compo" he deserved from the orchard owner. Happily, he also invented calculus. Born on an English farm in 1642, this inquisitive, lonely man displayed prodigious childhood talent, went to Cambridge and by his early 20s was being hailed as a scientific genius. Newton devised modern mathematics and revolutionised telescopy. The hugely influential and notoriously unreadable Principia Mathematica sealed his reputation. A lifelong passion for alchemy was ironically rewarded with his appointment as Master of the Royal Mint. He was a lifelong celibate with few friends and reportedly laughed only once. Gleick's is a brief and sympathetic biography but his account of Newton's achievements may baffle the less scientifically minded. - Michael Parsons
Words and Music. Paul Morley, Bloomsbury, £7.99
There's no getting away from it: Words and Music is infuriatingly brilliant - brilliant because author Morley manages to encapsulate all that's life-affirming and stimulating about pop music within the space of 360 pages; infuriating because it has more words per sentence than your average Molly Bloom soliloquy. Utilising a drive towards a virtual city with Kylie Minogue as his front seat passenger (yes, the book is quite pretentious, too) in order to contextualise his inner narrative on the nature of popular music, Morley regularly strains the patience. Yet his arguments, opinions and explorations are so persuasively expressed that one can only shake the head in a blend of admiration and amusement. Infuriatingly brilliant, then. And vice versa. - Tony Clayton-Lea
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded. Simon Winchester, Penguin, £7.99
If it weren't for the prolific Simon Winchester's name above the title, it would have been easy to pass over this book as one of esoteric interest. But this is not just the story of one of the biggest volcanic eruptions the world has ever known, it's about a great deal more. After Krakatoa "lifted her skirts" the world was never the same. Not least among a long list of consequences were: giant tsunamis killed tens of thousands, Muslims took on the Dutch colonists, many thought it was Judgement Day, and the resultant sunsets inspired artists around the world. The talented Mr Winchester has woven together reams of disparate data into a fascinating whole. Incidently, he also reminds us that Krakatoa was actually west of Java, not east as the film would have us believe. - John Moran
John Clare: A Biography. Jonathon Bate, Picador, £25
It is difficult to know where best to focus praise for this biography of the Romantic, uneducated farm labourer - who could write poetry on a par with Wordsworth and Keats while holding that grammar and spelling standardisation could well be done without. For the non-Clare scholar there is a strong sense of how the poet's life was lived against the social and political canvas of early 19th-century, rural Northamptonshire. Topics such as Enclosure (the movement that removed use of common land from non-titled rural dwellers) and methods of getting published (by subscription from wealthy and not-so-wealthy patrons) are so well realized as to sequester attention for themselves. Showing how the poet's original writings were edited, complied, changed or interfered with, Bate addresses the enormous number of poems (over 3,000), scores of essays and reams of natural history and, in the process, releases Clare from the tag "nature poet". - Kate Bateman