Paperbacks

Once Upon a Secret: My Hidden Affair With JFK

Mimi Alford

Random House, £12.99

Since the Monica Lewinsky-Bill Clinton scandal the words "White House" followed by "intern" have an unsavoury resonance, but as Mimi Alford's autobiography shows, Lewinsky was not the first. Tall, attractive and a virgin, Alford arrived at the White House in 1962, fresh from boarding school, for a summer internship. In her first week the teenager was plucked from the typing pool by a presidential aide as a sexual partner for John F Kennedy. Her sexual exploitation lasted 18 months, until JFK's death. Alford's cool, vivid, at times explicit, though emotionally quite detached, description of those 18 months reveals a relationship built on inequality of power and her willingness to be on call as his sexual partner. The relationship remained secret until 2003, when a Kennedy biographer discovered documentary evidence. Alford, who is now a grandmother, has written what reads like a call for privacy, an attempt to have her say once and for all on an affair she wouldn't have spoken about if she hadn't first been outed by a book, then chased by the press. Bernice Harrison

More Lives Than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada

Jenny Williams

Penguin, £12.99

The scholarship, judgment and intrepid research that the Belfast-born academic Jenny Williams brings to her disciplined study of the hyperobservant, deeply troubled German writer Hans Fallada – born Rudolf Ditzen – answers many questions about the extent of his lack of resistance to National Socialism and about how readers can best understand the impulses that made him a writer. Williams notes Fallada's regard for Dickens and Wilde, and, while never offering dramatic claims or excuses for Ditzen the man, whose behaviour was often dangerously erratic, she explains Fallada the artist. Even more impressively, she places him within the complicated, compromised and changing world of German cultural life as Nazi ideology began to infiltrate and destroy. The book is notable for its scrupulous use of correspondence and source material. Williams's reading of Fallada's work is superb, her engagement with Ditzen and his family and friends uncanny. A calmly authoritative biography. Eileen Battersby

The Species Seekers

Richard Conniff

Norton, £12.99

The subtitle of this book – Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth– captures its ambience perfectly. A swashbuckling swing through the heyday of Victorian natural history, it fondly chronicles the men and women who took the feverish hunt for new species to the farthest reaches of the planet. With chapters arranged around the topics of, among many others, shells, arsenic, craniology and the Ohio river, Conniff covers a vast range of subjects. Here be fish floating in alcohol, lizards dead and alive, stuffed turtles and squashed butterflies galore. We learn about dubious colonial practices, lifelong rivalries, misnomers and misconceptions. Characters, however, are Conniff's main quarry, and as a result, with his crisp style and waspish humour, he brings a fascinating period of scientific history into vivid focus. "Charles Darwin," he writes, "had been searching for a small type of rhea in Patagonia when it dawned on him, one Christmas dinner, that he had just eaten it." Oops. Arminta Wallace

Chapman’s Odyssey

Paul Bailey

Bloomsbury, £7.99

Harry Chapman prepares for his final exit like the actor, writer and poetry-lover that he is. He charms the hospital nurses by reciting some of his favourite poems, bringing a little culture and happiness into a bleak public ward. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, Harry receives visitors, some corporeal, some ghostly and many entirely fictional. The most persistent voice is that of Harry's harridan of a late mother, persistently haranguing and belittling her sensitive son. But it is characteristic of this gentle novel that Harry makes his peace with her, as with all of his ghostly visitors. Harry's odyssey, from working-class child to comfortable literary man, punctuated by a number of significant gay relationships, is far from Homeric. His story is told with distinctively English understatement and an often bleak humour. Significantly, one of Harry's regular visitors is the frail Bartleby, the mysterious scrivener of Melville's equally quiet story – a man who simply fades away. Tom Moriarty

Not Fade Away: The Life and Music of Buddy Holly

John Gribbin

Icon, £8.99

A science writer turning his gaze away from the cosmos to pen a biography of a rock'n'roll legend? That'll be the day. But it's true: John Gribbin's latest book focuses on the short life and supernova career of a singular star, who fell to earth in a plane crash in 1959, aged 22. But don't expect complex equations, mind-blowing theories or quantum leaps. Not Fade Away is written from a lifelong fan's point of view; it's simple, straightforward and clearly in thrall to its subject. But though you needn't worry that Gribbin hasn't done his research – he's good at outlining the science of how the plane crashed – this is more a brief history of Holly than an in-depth probe of his life and times. Kevin Courtney