The latest paperback releases
Carry Me Down, MJ Hyland, Canongate, £7.99
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006, Carry Me Down is an intriguing novel. The narrator is John Egan, a tall, troubled 11-year-old boy who is hoping his ability to tell when people are lying will bring him fame and, most importantly, get him into the Guinness Book of Records. It also, unsurprisingly, causes problems both at home and at school. Moving from rural Wexford to Ballymun, the tale takes unexpected twists and turns and through John's plain, unadorned account of events, Hyland conveys skilfully the strangeness of ordinary life and how a dysfunctional family can affect the children trapped in it. The cover blurbs include an endorsement from JM Coetzee and Hyland has a similar cool, spare prose style. Her refusal to charm or accommodate serves the book - and its truth-related themes - well, making for an unsettling, compelling read. Cathy Dillon
Black Swan Green, David Mitchell, Sceptre, £7.99
David Mitchell's follow-up to his award-winning Cloud Atlas is set in 1982 and follows a year in the life of 13-year-old Jason, an aspiring poet with a stutter and a gradually disintegrating family. The first-person narrative elaborately tries to give convincing voice to a boy on the edge of puberty, struggling with bullying and small-town life, but Jason's interior monologue is inconsistent, at times precociously literary, at others unbelievably naïve, seriously undermining the reader's belief in the protagonist. Worse, the persistent references to 1980s events, songs and products - here's the Falklands War, listen to that Human League, solve this Rubik's Cube - only serves to draw attention to the narrative's artificiality rather than genuinely evoke the period. Finally, the actual story is very slight, surely better suited to a short story. All in all, it's overwrought but underwhelming. Davin O'Dwyer
Alentejo Blue, Monica Ali, Black Swan, £6.99
Following her success with the award-winning Brick Lane, Monica Ali takes us on a tour of the small Portuguese village of Mamarrosa, telling a different person's story in each richly written chapter, ending with a good old-fashioned village knees-up, Portuguese-style. Nestled in the hills populated by majestic cork oaks, it is the kind of place that seems to exist merely on the way to somewhere, or from somewhere else. For the corpulent café owner, Vasco, it is where his life ended up after years working in America; for the writer, Stanton, it is meant to be a place to find renewed inspiration; for the English Potts family it is meant to be a place of retreat but has become a place of exile. Most poignantly, for solitary local João, Mamarrosa has always been a place of exile. The village is united by the return of Marco, rich from undisclosed activities, whose plans for it keep chins wagging and rumour rife. Claire Looby
On Late Style, Edward Said, Bloomsbury, £8.99
Based on a seminar Edward Said taught in 1995, On Late Style examines the work of artists such as Thomas Mann, Jean Genet and Beethoven at the end of their lives. Rejecting the idea of late style as one of harmony and resolution, Said instead explores the notion of artistic lateness as intransigence and unresolved contradiction.
Ibsen's last plays, Said argues, reveal an angry and perplexed author; Beethoven's final works are evasive, "socially resistant" while Cosi fan tutte exposes the "uncertain moral centre" of Mozart. By examining late style in the context of an artist's development and evolution, Said argues that late works of such ingenuity acted as symbols of what artistic changes lay ahead. On Late Style is a testament to the enduring brilliance of Said, who himself battled with leukaemia in the last years of his life. Sorcha Hamilton
The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, Gavin Stamp, Profile, £8.99
The first World War was the inspiration for what is arguably architect Edward Lutyens's greatest achievement, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, at Thiepval in northern France, visited annually by tens of thousands. Written by an acclaimed architectural historian, this book tells the origin of the project in the context of commemorating the war dead and considers the majestic arch in architectural and intellectual terms, as well as explaining its emotional complexity and melancholic power to move. We learn, too, about the life and myriad fortunes of Lutyens himself. Indeed, this is how history should be written, with the narrative flow weaving in and out of social and political events but going beyond to demonstrate how Lutyens created, not just a building, but a monument. Mary O'Leary
Kate: The Woman Who Was Katharine Hepburn, William J Mann, Faber, £9.99
Digging some kind of truth out from under the larger-than-life legend of Katharine Hepburn is no easy task. But unlike earlier biographers of the star, Mann gives his study a specific focus, zeroing in on Hepburn's evolution from wealthy New England tomboy to irreverent college co-ed and, finally, revered actress of the silver screen. Mann leaves the story to Hepburn, revealing the personal and romantic relationships - with both men and women - that influenced her most. Using hundreds of anecdotes, interviews - and careful analysis - he concludes that in the end, it was Hepburn, not the press, who truly created the legend of Kate. It's a tale worth reading for longtime fans or anyone with an interest in early Hollywood, though after more than 500 pages, even Mann has to concede that Hepburn's legend has actually "only begun". Erin Golden