This week's paperbacks
Falling Man
By Don DeLillo
Picador, £7.99
There is something appropriate about Don DeLillo confronting the events of 9/11. He is a meticulous chronicler of New York life, after all, but more than that, his novels have long blended the historical and the fictional, one constantly refracting the other, such as giving life and voice to Lee Harvey Oswald or filling his masterpiece, Underworld, with vignettes encapsulating the entire span of post-war American history. Falling Man tells the story of 9/11 survivor Keith, who exists in a state of enduring post-traumatic shock, and who struggles to adjust to the altered reality. Throughout, we are reminded of DeLillo's flair for illuminating complexity, fascinated as he is by the webs of cause and effect, of coincidence and action. Nearly every phrase, every sentence, is loaded with an aching perception, as if the sudden act of violence has redrawn life in sharper focus, even if it is now more difficult to understand. The result is a forceful, formidable triumph.
Davin O'Dwyer
Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey: A Biography
By Alberto Manguel
Atlantic Books, £8.99
Manguel believes a biography of a book is a history of its readers, and he proceeds to explore, ingeniously and extensively, how Homer's masterpieces have influenced people in all walks of life, but most of all - and hardly surprisingly - writers. That influence has ranged from Virgil's Aeneid to Joyce's Ulysses and beyond.
Goethe hailed his own century as the one fortunate enough to have witnessed the rebirth of Homer but Manguel shows this claim could easily be made for the centuries before and after as well. One of the most moving influences may be found in Constantine Cavafy's poem Ithaca, the name of Ulysses's island home to which he journeys through many adventures in The Odyssey. For Cavafy, Ithaca stands for all our hopes and dreams, and his poem ends: "And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / You'll have understood by then what these Ithacas mean." Brian Maye
Bambi Vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business
By David Mamet
Pocket Books, £8.99
In this collection of essays, playwright and film-maker David Mamet rants, opines and enthuses about the denizens, conditions and products of the American film industry. The pieces include exposés of the seedy business, advice for budding film-makers and appreciation of movies he approves of. The style is Mamet's usual fusion of machismo and bookishness, with military wisdom ("when your plan of battle is proceeding perfectly, you have just walked into an ambush") sitting alongside ancient philosophy. It's an uneven collection, at its worst when the director indulges his didactic streak. One gets the impression that Mamet, like one of the characters in his great play Glengarry Glen Ross, is the type of man who would buy you a pack of gum and show you how to chew it. It is at its best when he shows his astuteness in discussing specifics, rather than lecturing on general principles - it is wise and insightful, and written with humour and wit.
Colm Farren
A Far Country
By Daniel Mason
Picador, £7.99
Young Harvard graduate Daniel Mason's first novel, The Piano Tuner, shot to the top of the best-seller lists in 2003 and won him instant critical acclaim. This, his much anticipated follow-up, has so far failed to recreate the literary storm that surrounded its predecessor. Isabel and her family live in a remote village on the edge of a sugar-cane plantation, eking out an existence amid poverty and drought. When her beloved brother, Isaias, runs away to seek his fortune in the city, Isabel sets out on a long dangerous journey to find him - and in the process finds herself. The occasional striking image - hunger is a "pale, hoofed creature" - fails to compensate for a narrative that is repetitive and flat, and for characters who ultimately fail to engage. It is said that everyone has one good book in them and, in Mason's case, there is little here to suggest otherwise.
Freya McClements
Self Help
By Edward Docx
Picador, £7.99
News of their mother's death comes as a shock to Gabriel and Isabella Glover. Masha Glover had been living in St Petersburg - the home to which she returned after the dissolution of her disastrous marriage. Isabella and Gabriel are living in New York and London respectively, both struggling with problematic relationships and fighting an instinct for self-sabotage. Their estranged father, Nicholas, lives a dissolute life in Paris. It is a family that has fled itself. Meanwhile, a fourth person is touched by Masha's death: her unacknowledged son, abandoned long ago in a St Petersburg orphanage. These four people are forced into reluctant confrontation with each other and themselves. Questions that have lain dormant come to the surface, bringing a fierce need for answers both factual and psychological. A Russian winter, the underbelly of society, a family's secret past: Docx's novel brings us through this murky territory with a slow, dark intensity.
Claire Anderson-Wheeler