Paperbacks

Beauty the Inferno Roberto Saviano Maclehose Press, £9.99Roberto Saviano is the author of Gomorrah, a book, and subsequently a prize-winning film, that so rigorously exposed the dirty dealings of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia-style organisation, that the author has had to live under 24-hour police protection ever since.

This book of essays finds him writing on a range of topics, from Olympic boxing through cocaine trafficking to Lionel Messi. He interviews Joe Pistone, the FBI agent who was the model for the film character Donnie Brasco. He muses on depictions in art of the Vietnam War and on the tedium of his imprisonment. But it’s when he tackles the crime lords of southern Italy that his voice soars in a crescendo of outrage. Saviano doesn’t muck about. He names names. He cites the statistics on increased cancer rates in Italy, caused by the dumping of toxic waste, a Mafia moneyspinner. He repeats the stories of murdered innocents over and over so they won’t be forgotten. In his piece on the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer he describes literature as a kind of howl. After reading this, we should all be howling. Somebody might, eventually, hear us.

Arminta Wallace

State of Wonder

Ann Patchett

Bloomsbury, £7.99

Something strange is happening in a remote spot in the Brazilian Rio Negro. A difficult, brilliant scientist called Dr Annick Swenson is developing a secret drug that could drastically affect female fertility. The problem is that nobody can track her down, not even the company funding her research, and the last man sent to find her never came home. A former student of Dr Swenson, Marina Singh, is asked to investigate. But it’s no easy task, hanging around in the heat of Manaus, hoping desperately for clues about the scientist and her whereabouts. Plagued by recurring nightmares as a side effect of the malaria tablets she’s taking, and by a serious regret from years ago, Marina finds herself in an increasingly difficult position. Shortlisted for this year’s Orange Prize, this is a gripping read – even if it stalls briefly in the middle – full of fascinating questions about ethics, science and why we live the way we do.

Sorcha Hamilton

Manuscripts Don’t Burn – Mikhail Bulgakov: A Life in Letters and Diaries

JAE Curtis

Bloomsbury, £10.99

In 1929 all of Bulgakov’s writing was banned by the Soviet censors. Verging on destitution, he wrote a defiant letter to the government, requesting to be sent abroad as he could not write a “Communist play”. The surprising response was a friendly phone call from Stalin, promising him a job with the Moscow Arts Theatre. This position provided some security, but his plays were rarely performed and Bulgakov was nearly always broke, ill, exhausted or a nervous wreck. Under such horrible conditions, it is astonishing not only that he persevered as a professional writer (he was a qualified doctor) but also that he made work of such daring originality in an environment that did its best to choke him. His best writing never saw publication in his lifetime. The magnificent The Master and Margarita was written in secret and first published 26 years after his death. These letters and diary entries reveal with forceful immediacy the author’s life of attrition, and his strength of character.

Colm Farren

My Dad Was Nearly James Bond

Des Bishop

Penguin, €11.99

The cancer diagnosis and death of his father, Mike, frame this tribute by the comedian Des Bishop, but while the grief is acutely documented, it is his son’s piecing together of Mike’s early life in England and Ireland that sets the book apart. Mike’s time as a model and actor in London, before he moved to New York and started a family, was a life of maybes and near misses that exacerbated a troublesome craving for approval, which his son, a veteran of therapy as well as stage and screen, knows he has inherited. Impeccably structured, the book also details Des Bishop’s artistic process in compiling the stand-up show and documentary that preceded it. Bishop doesn’t shy away from self-deprecating parallels or the ethical dimension of using his family’s personal histories to create this work – a career highlight he should have no regrets about.

Laura Slattery

Invisible Monsters Remix

Chuck Palahniuk

Vintage Books, £9.99

Thankfully, Chuck Palahniuk doesn’t create ordinary characters; there is always a strand of weirdness to them. More often than not, the weirdness springs from Palahniuk’s cold-eyed look at how we construct our lives in order to keep a lid on the hurt, disappointment and fears that are inescapable, in the interest of appearing normal. In this reconstructed version of his 1999 novel, Palahniuk’s narrator is an erstwhile beautiful young woman whose jaw is shot off, and whose face cannot be rebuilt as magpies and jackdaws have eaten what remained of it. Unable to talk, and living behind beautiful veils, she now steals prescription hormone pills from big houses with a forceful transsexual goddess, Brandy Alexander. With its nonlinear format and instructions to jump from one chapter to another, this book might appear to be style over substance, but that’s the point: if you don’t want to look beyond the style, whether it’s ugly or beautiful, you’ll never find out what’s beneath.

Claire Looby