Our pick of the latest releases
Bed
David Whitehouse
Canongate, £7.99
Before you settle down under the duvet with a box of pralines to read this, take note: the titular bed contains one morbidly obese man, Mal, who has been lying there for 20 years, stuffing his face and growing bigger and more bloated by the day, until he resembles something out of a Channel 4 Bodyshock documentary. Mal was always the focal point of the Ede family; now he's the giant, fleshy planet around which the rest orbit. Or maybe he's just the more visible elephant in the room. When Mal's ex-girlfriend, Lou, re-enters their world, however, Mal's younger brother – the book's narrator – becomes determined to break free, and take Lou with him. Whitehouse's startling debut novel tackles heavy family issues with light, deft prose and an eye for the absurd. It's a sympathetic, sometimes revolting and often very funny depiction of a family buckling under the weight of its own inertia. Kevin Courtney
The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Elif Batuman
Granta, £8.99
Batuman, a young graduate student who is very American but of Turkish heritage, wants to be a writer. Her fiction muse proves slowish to emerge, so she reverts to the academic skirmish of travel grants and research scholarships. Luckily for readers of this vividly engaging travelogue-cum-memoir, Batuman is particularly drawn to the glories of 19th-century Russian fiction. Her interest results in a journey reminiscent of Alice's odyssey through Wonderland. A conference brings her to Tolstoy's famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where the great man seems to come to life. She considers Peter the Great's creation of a new imperial capital, Petersburg. History and literature are wittily juxtaposed with often squalid modern-day realities. Batuman, who now writes for the New Yorker, is an astute observer with a terrific sense of humour and immense bravado: her descriptions of the people she meets while learning Uzbek are hilarious. Ever the scholar amid the comedy, she offers a perceptive reading of the novel that inspires her title, Dostoyevsky's The Devils. Eileen Battersby
War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War, 1939-1940
Jean-Paul Sartre
Verso, £8.99
"I feel strangely bashful about embarking on a study of temporality." The sentence is unmistakably, almost painfully Sartrean. What makes it remarkable, however, is that it was written not in a Left Bank cafe but at an army outpost in Alsace. Sartre found himself billeted there as a lowly reservist after his mobilisation in September 1939. Within nine months he would be a prisoner of war. The experience of wartime draft forced the 34-year-old champion of existential individualism to face up to the radical unfreedom of his social existence. While the rest of Europe was bracing itself for an imminent German invasion, he elected to use every spare minute to embark on an obsessive project of personal and philosophical self-scrutiny that would fill 14 notebooks and run to hundreds of thousands of words. Only five notebooks have survived, and their welcome reissue gives us a rare chance to watch a major intellect reinvent himself and his worldview in real time. Daragh Downes
Europe in the Looking-Glass
Robert Byron
Hesperus, £12
First published in 1926, this book shows Robert Byron attempting a new kind of travel writing that tells as much about the writer as it does about the places visited. It's a story of three rich young Englishmen driving through Germany, Italy and Greece between the wars. Byron enjoys many chance encounters and comic episodes, described with colourful ease, but also offers some serious political insights into Mussolini's Italy, Kemal's Turkey and a restless Germany; indeed, it is a picture of a continent that was soon to change utterly. He is given to hyperbole (Donatello's were "the greatest portrait sculptures of European civilisation") but is surely right to assert that Siena "reigns supreme among the hill towns". He became a noted philhellene, and his description of the Parthenon as "the supreme challenge of man's hand to that of Time" would be hard to better. The prejudices of Byron's time and background are in evidence, but so too are the signs of an intellect that soon transformed him into the celebrated travel writer and art critic he became. Brian Maye
Crazy River: A Plunge into Africa
Richard Grant
Little, Brown, £13.99
Abandoning the "safari bubble" of previous trips to Africa, Richard Grant conceives the "crazy" project of navigating Tanzania's second-largest river, the Malagarasi. Throw in half-baked notions of following in the footsteps of the 19th-century explorers Burton and Livingstone and the stage is set for bizarre misadventures. Banditry, ruthless poachers, hippos, crocodiles and myriad infections are just some of the obstacles on the river. Grant is petulant as he tries to bully his guiding team to run foolhardy risks. In the end the river journey is cut short, but much of the bite of the book concerns what happens before and after the descent. Grant is a diverting companion as he plunges into the nightlife of Zanzibar and the urban jungle of Dar es Salaam. The final section, where he writes insightfully about the different ways Burundi and Rwanda are coping with the aftermath of civil war, is a disturbing jolt after the earlier spirit of derring-do. Jack Hanna
