Paperbacks

Our pick of this week's releases

Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed the World

Norman Lebrecht

Faber and Faber, £9.99

In the 50 years from 1960 to 2010, Mahler went "from near zero to folk hero". Exploring this phenomenon, Norman Lebrecht opines that "for Mahler message was all . . . The meaning beneath the music was the most important thing," and conductors are free to interpret his compositions in their own way. An inveterate collector of Mahler memorabilia and the author of Mahler Remembered, Lebrecht here gives a threefold explanation of why Mahler's music affects us in the way it does. Mahler exposed dark, private traumas, hoping to examine and alleviate human misery; he felt he didn't belong anywhere in the world and so suits a culturally diverse 21st century, and the "fluidity" of his work is strikingly postmodern, chiming with what musicians and listeners are feeling in a fast-changing and often threatening world. Best of all, Mahler's music "tells us that it is all right to be who we are; it might even be admirable". A fascinating, passionate, fast-paced book, its claims may border on the extravagant at times. Brian Maye

Luke and Jon

Robert Williams

Faber and Faber, £6.99

Robert Williams was a bookseller at Waterstone's when he won a prize for unpublished writers three years ago. The finished novel, Luke and Jon,is the story of young male friendship in a northern English industrial town. The story is narrated by the adolescent Luke, whose mother's sudden death has sent his father, a toymaker, into alcoholism. Father and son are forced to move to a dilapidated house in Duerdale, where Luke befriends Jon, an eccentric kid who's bullied at school. There are few surprises in the plot; what's enchanting about this novel is the cool and restrained language, for example in the descriptions of the dramatic wooden horse sculpture Luke's father builds in the woods by their house. Williams's understated style and eye for small, intimate details keep the many heavy, dark moments in this novel from becoming melodramatic. Emily Firetog

Things We Didn’t See Coming

Steven Amsterdam

Vintage Books, £7.99

Apocalypse fiction, to state the blindingly obvious, tends to be a rather sombre affair. It's a genre that generally eschews any lightness of touch in favour of either wide-angled depictions of grandiose calamity or laboured portraits of the 1,000 minute drudgeries that make up these grave new worlds. How refreshing, then, to see Steven Amsterdam's tale of elemental destruction and sociological collapse so pleasingly reframe the time-honoured tropes. Comprised of nine snappy, day-long vignettes, each one separated by years, it is the story of one man's steadfast determination to survive in a volatile, ever-changing world in the wake of an unspecified environmental catastrophe. Though the book is far from short on darkness, and is full of odd, thought-provoking ideas, the author's central preoccupation is with the tender, ragged human relationships that illuminate his protagonist's journey, even when all other lights have been extinguished. Dan Sheehan

The Life of an Unknown Man

Andreï Makine

Sceptre, £8.99

Jilted by his much younger lover, Shutov, an unsuccessful Russian novelist living in a Parisian attic, subsists on vodka, Chekhov and memories of a fleeting romance 20 years before. On returning to Leningrad, he finds that the city of his memories has been replaced by a brash, modern St Petersburg and that he "lacks the Russian words to translate such a new reality". Solace comes in the form of Volsky, the titular "unknown man", who tells him of his life in the besieged city during the second World War, of years spent as a prisoner in the Soviet camps, and of an extraordinary love affair. Makine, himself a Russian emigre who writes in French, won France's premier literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for this tale of 20th-century Russia and the sacrifices occasioned by its push towards modernity. At novel's end, Shutov realises he will never view life as once he did – and many readers will feel the same. Freya McClements

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

Tom Franklin

Pan Books, £7.99

The strange repetitive title is, according to the author, part of a mnemonic device familiar to Southern children learning to spell Mississippi: “M, I, crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, crooked-letter, crooked-letter, I, humpback, humpback, I.”

This harrowing tale, told with ease and control, tracks back and forth across the adult lives and harsh schooldays of two Southern boys. By page seven we know white man Larry Ott of Chabot, Mississippi, is suspected of murdering "the Rutherford girl" and that 25 years previously he was chief suspect in the unresolved murder of Cindy Walker, also a young white woman. This time, the investigation is in the hands of his one-time schoolmate Silas Jones. Constable Jones is black. Though he wishes to advance up the law-enforcement ranks, he is not rapacious. Among the tensions in the book are humiliating childhood incidents and countervailing adult insights – slow learning of and from early crimes and misdemeanours? It's a literary crime-mystery for dark evenings. Kate Bateman