Our pick of the week's releases

The Time of My Life

Cecelia Ahern

HarperCollins, £7.99

Lucy Silchester, liar extraordinaire, receives not one, not two, but three invitations to meet up with her Life. Her main problem is that she has no wish to change the miserable life she has been living since being dumped by her gorgeous and "perfect" boyfriend, moving into a tiny studio apartment and stealing a cat out of a dumpster for company. She hates her family and her job, and is doing nothing to change any of it, until her family, strangely enough, sign her up to a programme where she can meet her Life in person. It turns out to be a bureaucrat in a rumpled suit, straight out of central casting. The book gives the distinct impression, for this reviewer at least, that Ahern was writing it with a film adaptation in mind. She offers little in the way of insight into what, if anything, makes Lucy tick, and creates a flimsy, perky, pseudo-surreal world that leaves us indifferent about whether Lucy ever gets a life at all. Claire Looby

C

Tom McCarthy

Jonathan Cape, £7.99

Transmissions, connections, codes and messages are at the heart of McCarthy's complex, resonant book, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010. An avant-garde collage of history, tragedy and technology, it charts the life of Serge Carrefax, a boy born in England in 1898 to a dysfunctional family immersed in natural sciences and cutting-edge communications (his inventor father is competing with Marconi). It follows him from his strange, beautiful home to a German spa town, to the battlefields of the Great War, to drug-addled London in the Roaring Twenties, and to Egypt, where westerners are exploring the ancient tombs. The extremely detailed accounts of various machines and early technologies at times made my non-techie needle skip over the surface, but McCarthy's descriptions of nature and of the everyday details of the era are vivid, surprising and true. And while the writing is often beautiful and ornate, the story has a bracing, Beckett-like severity. Cathy Dillon

The Language Wars: A History of Proper English

Henry Hitchings

John Murray, £8.99

You'd be forgiven for thinking that a book containing discourses on grammar and syntax, on dangling prepositions and split infinitives, might be hard going. But, no, this is a hugely entertaining overview of the many battles fought down the centuries on many fronts over the "proper" use of English. While noting the language's origins in the Germanic settlers who came to Britain in the fifth century and the influence of the Norman Conquest, Hitchings is particularly concerned with the reassertion of English after Agincourt and the many contested attempts to standardise the language up to the present. This book is an amusing, lucid and erudite account of those fractious attempts at propriety, its 28 chapters full of colour and drama and covering literature, snobbery, American English, modern usage and more, all garnished with gorgeous anecdotes and quotes by the entertaining author, who is also the London Evening Standard's theatre critic. John Moran

The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno

Ellen Bryson

Picador, £7.99

In 1865 New York was a city of wooden houses and horse-drawn trams, its population struggling to recover from a civil war and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It is also home to Barnum's American Museum, where Fortuno the Human Skeleton falls hopelessly in love with the mysterious and beautiful Bearded Lady. Narrated in sumptuous detail by Fortuno, this tale of love and obsession in an extraordinary institution, beloved of New Yorkers, reveals the weirdly wonderful existences of the people who lived at the museum and who prized their position in the entertainment world. When we find out how Fortuno became the Human Skeleton and why his "gift" is of such importance to him, we also see how delicate and essential such things are to a man, being more than mere skin and bone. This is an evocative and impressive debut from Ellen Bryson, full of pathos and brimming with the spirit of the age. Claire Looby

The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life

Bettany Hughes

Vintage, £9.99

Socrates left no written record, so Bettany Hughes embarked on vividly sketching his landscape, Athens in the fifth century BC, the city's golden age. You won't get a better introduction to every aspect of the classical city than this. Through it all moves Socrates, "one of the most provocative and provoking thinkers of all time". He's this because he does "that shocking thing . . . he implies there might be a way to be fulfilled on this earth". How? By seeking to understand and be at peace with ourselves. How could Athens have condemned such a man to death? Because "he shunned the material wealth that empire brought . . . and worried that the pursuit of plenty would bring mindless materialism". Also, Athenians took their gods seriously and probably blamed their recent disastrous defeat by Sparta on divine displeasure, part of the reason for which could have been the presence in their midst of one (Socrates) they considered an influentially impious citizen. A fascinating, provocative read. Brian Maye