The latest paperbacks reviewed
Aloft Chang-Rae Lee Bloomsbury, £7.99
In late middle age, Italian- American widower Jerry Battle, retired from the family landscape business his son's grasping wife is destroying, discovers hobby flying. Meanwhile, exasperated long-serving girlfriend Rita, who raised his tragic dead wife's two children, has had enough, and also takes to flight - from Jerry. High above the clouds, he forgets his problems, and, an inveterate watcher, takes to pondering exactly what happened to his life. This impressive third novel from Chinese-born, US-based Princeton lecturer Chang-Rae Lee is initially shaped by Richard Ford and John Updike if ultimately by Richard Russo. Old Jerry can sound overly intellectually analytical. But Lee has a saving light touch and Aloft is a convincing portrait of a likeable Everyman belatedly confronting his multiple domestic realities. Eileen Battersby
Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of BS Johnson Jonathan Coe Picador, £9.99
BS Johnson was born in London in 1933 and committed suicide at the age of 40. In between, he published five novels, had his plays performed on the BBC Third Programme, wrote poetry and covered sports for a number of national newspapers. Regarded as an avant-garde writer, - one of his novels had holes cut in the pages so that the reader could look into the future - he also wrote one of the most poignant poems I have ever read, A Dublin Unicorn, which was inspired by a Dublin girl he fancied who startled him - a sturdy rationalist who went to night classes to learn Latin - by saying she'd been so tired she'd fallen asleep in the middle of saying her night-time prayers. He lived outside the box, displaying the sort of humour at which the English excel - droll and deeply black - and the literary world is the better for it. Coe's biography, eight years in the writing, has just won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Mary Russell
Bill Brandt: A Life Paul Delany Cape/Pimlico £15
Bill Brandt was the greatest English photographer of the 20th century - except that he was not English. He was born in Hamburg in 1904, and lived in the German-speaking lands until 1934, when he moved to London where he based himself for the rest of his life. His photographs of England and the English catch the quintessence of the country in a way that perhaps only an outsider could do. For Brandt, secretiveness was a mode of being; he was one of those people who can live in any way fully only behind a mask. Paul Delany's richly illustrated Life - what a bargain it is, at £15 - reads like an espionage novel, and presents in fascinating detail the facts behind the "cover" adopted by this strange, enigmatic and slightly sinister artist. John Banville
A Dark Day on the Blaskets Micheal Ó Dubhsláine Brandon Books, NPG
In 1909 a gifted young Irish language scholar travels to south west Kerry but in a double tragedy drowns along with the son of An tOileánach. Micheal Ó Dubhsláine tells the story of the deaths of Eibhlín Nic Niocaill and Dónall Ó Criomhtain by weaving together written acounts and newspaper reports, painting a picture of Irish political and cultural society of the time. More importantly it brings to life what it was like to live in the Kerry Gaeltacht and what drew Mac Niocaill there. Mac Niocail was a vivacious Irish language activist who is rumoured to have had more than a deep friendship with Pádraig Pearse. She only travelled to the Blaskets because acomadation in Corca Dhuibhne was full. This book is both a historical recollection and a dramatic reconstruction of a sad event that lived long in the memory of Irish language enthusiasts. Eoghan Morrissey
Black Gold: A Dark History of Coffee Antony Wild Harper Perennial, £8.99
In a fact-packed colossus of an at times politicised history, Wild runs the narrative across continents, tracing the ancestry and providence of coffee from its pubescent beginnings in Ethiopia, Yemen and St Helena to the plantations and exploitation of colonised slavery in the Caribbean and the two Americas. From the coarse low-grade Robusta to the high-quality Arabica, the commercialisation of the dark elixir, its relationship with tea, the highs and lows of caffeine, Monsanto's production of mycoherbicides and Agent Orange, the fall of Mocha (in Yemen), Napoleon's incarceration on St Helena, and more are discussed. This is is a detailed overview of the current trends in coffee production, cultivation, growing and drinking habits and for the record, Wild, a coffee taster, buyer, marketing guru and connoisseur, has a preference for Guatemalan.Paul O'Doherty
I'll Go to Bed at Noon Gerard Woodward Vintage, 437pp. £6.99
The members of the Jones family are again under scrutiny (the first time was in Woodward's August) in this unflinching, wonderfully absurdist account of their lives in and around a north London suburb in the 1970s. Their names signal that this is no ordinary family saga - Aldous is married to Colette, and she has a brother named Janus Brian whom she minds as he melds into a decline after his wife dies. Their four children - Janus, Julian, James and Juliette - nearly all have drink problems and partners at one time or another. Impartial, tolerant Colette, often the narrative voice, deserves full marks for never critisising, grumbling about or losing patience with any single one of them. Neither, it must be said do they castigate her. with delicious irony it illustrates how families coalesce - in spite of (some) violence and lots of wasted talent. It's a telling, amusing novel. Kate Bateman