Paperbacks

The pick of this week's paperbacks

A Freewheelin Time

Suze Rotolo

Aurum, £8.99

Suze Rotolo was Bob Dylan's girlfriend during the heady days of the early 1960s, when the young singer was just exploding onto New York's vibrant folk scene and the times were truly a-changin'. Just 17 when they met and fell in love, she was the beautiful girl who posed with him on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album. The daughter of Italian-American communists, Rotolo was politically active (she marched for civil rights and visited Cuba when it was a jailable offence) and artistically aware (she introduced Dylan to the work of Bertold Brecht, among others). Dylan's rapid rise to fame scuppered the relationship – Dylan moved on to Joan Baez and besides Rotolo, a painter, was not designed for life as a rock star's chick. Though she recalls the difficulties clearly, she is not one to dish dirt, and Dylan, as ever, remains an enigma. Nonetheless her memoir is engaging and very enjoyable and offers a welcome female perspective on a fascinating period. CATHY DILLON

An Education

Lynn Barber

Penguin, £7.99

Lynn Barber has had an interesting life. An Oxford graduate, she wrote for Penthouse before moving on to an award-winning career on Fleet Street. But a relationship with an older man when she was just 16 cast a long shadow over her. The affair, which inspired the new film, scarred her deeply and as Barber tells her story the spectre of “Simon” is constantly lurking.

An Education is the story of a girl who grew up too quickly, told with wit but also with an underlying melancholy. The journalist, branded Demon Barber for her confrontational interview style, knows how to spin a yarn. Her memoir is bracingly honest and she tells her story with a complete lack of pretension. She says when she discovered writing it was like finding her natural language and and her ease with words ensures the book zips along. The one frustration is there seems to be so much left to tell. RORY TEVLIN

The Rivers of Heaven

Anthony Gardner

Starhaven, €16

Sebastian, a young London photographer obsessed with the 1960s, longs to return to the Cotswolds cottage where he spent his happiest days as the only child of parents enjoying the era's bohemian rhapsody. On a London sink estate, Stella, a lonely young single mother, struggles to bring up her baby, Kit. Kit embarks on a Wordsworthian entry into the world "trailing clouds of glory" as he makes his way from heaven to earth. Some readers may find this hyper-lyrical strand of the novel fey, but it works: the three stories are deftly interwoven by Dublin-born writer Gardner into a quietly inspiring work. Sebastian has to make compromises with his long-divorced father to get the cottage; Stella learns the hard way what real love is; Kit falls to earth but survives. All discover that an ideal world - even if its only a pale reflection of Kit's glistening dreamworld – is possible. All you need is love . . . FRANCES O'ROURKE

The Vagrants

Yiyun Li

Fourth Estate, £7.99

The Vagrants is a powerful novel, just as much for the haunting juxtaposition of Li's calm, graceful prose with the horrific events she chronicles as for the striking indictment of the Chinese Communist regime it delivers. The story begins in 1979 with the execution of 28-year-old Gu Shan, a former Red Guard turned counterrevolutionary, in the provincial town of Muddy Water. Though democratic reform movements have begun 700 miles away in Beijing, the town remains a beacon of Communist loyalty; Shan's death is preceded by a denunciation ceremony filled with banners and songs. After, a small and marginal cast of characters – largely ignored by the officialdom of government – becomes intertwined: Shan's grieving parents, a couple of elderly street cleaners, a crippled young girl, a lewd man with unexplored sexual proclivities, a little boy who lost his dog, and a radio announcer who finds herself unsure of the government and her role in its propaganda machine. It is a beautiful novel, and a must read. EMILY FIRETOG

Our Story Begins

Tobias Wolff

Bloomsbury, £9.99

In these taut stories of disappointment, such as the classic Hunters in the Snow, the reader is often left to guess the presumably tragic consequences of the protangonists’ reckless self-absorption.

Another highlight is Firelight, a study of a respectably-impoverished mother and son on perhaps the very day that the youngster first begins to grow apart from the doting woman.Wolff shows us this subtly as they stroll around a university campus, her hand on his shoulder: “I began to feel the weight of that hand”. Of the new stories, the short, tight and simple Her Dog stands out with its improbably touching imagined conversation between a dog and his master, who both mourn the deceased mistress.

Wolff gifts his young characters with a keen eye for the significance of their surroundings. "It was like a house Russian spies would practice being Americans in," observes the hopeful suitor of a girl whose heart, inevitably, lies elsewhere.The dark but jaunty humour of Mortals is a joy. MARY MINIHAN