Paperbacks

Some of the latest paperback releases...

My Father's Tears Other StoriesJohn Updike Penguin, £8.99

John Updike’s final book, a collection of short stories, eloquently reiterates how great he was – and is. Few writers have better expressed the fearful, chaotic ambivalence chugging away in the name of love and desire than this master of irony. He identifies the collapse of anger, jealousy and emotional betrayal into painful regret. In the title story, the narrator, then at Harvard and on the train back to college, recalls: “I saw my father cry only once . . . I was going somewhere, and he was seeing me go.” Elsewhere, an absentee owner of his family’s land meets the farmer who rents it, the grown son of a neighbour he had tried to play softball with some 50 years earlier. God, sex and time, always the passing of time, dominate this memory book; its themes are death and age, the ghosts of old loves linger. There are traces of haste, yet Updike’s warm leave-taking is ultimately worthy of his humane, sensuous genius.

Blood's A RoverJames Ellroy Windmill Books, £7.99

The concluding part of Ellroy's Underworld USA trilogy opens in 1968 with Richard Nixon and J Edgar Hoover plotting to win the hearts and minds of the US while the Mafia schemes to replace Cuba with the Dominican Republic as the premier destination for offshore gambling and general debauchery. Meanwhile, the FBI is busy infiltrating the Black Power and anti-Vietnam factions, while a cache of stolen emeralds exercises the imaginations of sundry cops, robbers and social deviants. Less brutal in terms of its truncated prose than its predecessors, American Tabloidand The Cold Six Thousand, this combines epic ambition with the claustrophobically personalised detail for which Ellroy is renowned. In what is arguably his most autobiographical fiction to date, the overtly masculine tone of Ellroy's previous novels is here undermined by a succession of strong and empowered female characters. The result is a novel that offers a curious but very effective blend of muscular machismo and poignant longing.

The Sleepyhead's Bedside CompanionSean Coughlan Arrow, £7.99

Which British prime minister resigned after two years because he couldn’t find a cure for his insomnia, in spite of trying “every opiate but the House of Lords”? Why is adult sleep apnea – in which you stop breathing briefly while sleeping – a fast-growing condition, especially in the US, where the market in equipment and treatment is expected to double, to $4 billion, in the next four years? Why is getting only four hours’ sleep in order to get work done seen as a badge of commitment? And why is training small children to go to sleep – and stay that way – so damn difficult? The BBC journalist Sean Coughlan celebrates sleep – “natures finest and most mysterious free gift” – in a wide-ranging, anecdote-crammed and humorous story of sleep that covers everything from the origin of pyjamas to the meaning of dreams, why children like frightening bedtime stories and the many, many scientific studies into the nature and meaning of sleep. One for the bedside table.

Cockroach Rawi HagePenguin, £8.99

Somewhere between Gregor Samsa and the Underground Man is the narrator of Rawi Hage's second novel, Cockroach. Hage, who won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, De Niro's Game, in 2006, begins this story with the notion of exile. Though the narrator, a Middle Eastern exile living in Montreal, sees himself as a cockroach, he's unlike Kafka's Christ-like suffering giant. "Other humans gaze at the sky, but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground."

He survives (after a suicide attempt) in a world of immigrants; stealing, scrounging and trying to win over an unwinnable girl. At moments the story is deliberately alienating, but these instances are quickly dissolved by vivid and hallucinatory descriptions that lend a wild energy to Hawi’s prose. The heavily plotted second half becomes almost cinematic, its escalating drama driving the story quickly and skillfully to a close.

Glover's MistakeNick Laird Fourth Estate, £7.99

Two young men share an apartment in London. They maintain a constant stream of conversational keepy-uppy: snazzy little in-jokes, barbed banter and snide remarks about the women who flit across their TV screen. So far, so buddy book. Then Ruth arrives on the scene. She's David's find, a now-successful artist who taught him during his brief stint in art college – but it's James, much younger, much buffer and much, much dimmer, that she falls for. Laird has a light touch with the darkly comic: the opening scene at Ruth's exhibition, for example, where she has sold a sheet of paper bedecked with silver jewellery for $1 million; or David's blog, The Damp Review, on which he routinely rubbishes books, plays, takeaways and the assorted stuff of modern life. "Don't you find it exhausting?" asks their friend Jess. "Writing all those bad reviews. Detesting everything . . . " It's the nub of the thing, this distinction between simply reacting and actually feeling, and it's explored here in a seamlessly readable way.