Paperbacks

A selection of the latest releases

Ransom

By David Malouf

Vintage, £7.99

A great prince of Troy is slain by a powerful Greek warrior, one whose reputation for courage is matched only by his habitual savagery. The dead prince's body, tied to a chariot, is dragged over the stony ground. The ritualised violation is repeated day after day before the eyes of the dead prince's grieving parents. The father, Priam, is a great king, now ancient, but still a king and a father. He prepares to bargain with Achilles for the body of his beloved Hector. The Iliadis one of world literature's enduring stories. The Australian writer David Malouf, author of An Imaginary Life(1978), based on Ovid's exile, has given Homer's epic fresh life in this haunting mood piece, which centres on King Priam's sad quest: the retrieval of his son's corpse. All the dry heat of Troy and the ongoing tension created by warring forces ripple through a graceful, eloquent text dominated by rage and sorrow. Eileen Battersby

The Seas

By Samantha Hunt

Corsair, £7.99

Samantha Hunt's book owes more to the practically submarine landscape that it paints than the story it tells. This attention-grabbing novel reveals a nameless teenager stuck in a poor New England coastal town after the death of her father at sea. The Seastells her tale in language just raw enough to take the sweetness out of the hopeless love story that surrounds her older and equally damaged male best friend. It is essentially The Little Mermaidcome ashore in a nightmarish vision of the seafaring life, in which everything shifts like the tides. The characters yearn for permanence and solidity; even the girl's grandfather passes his days typesetting a dictionary just so he can hold the letters in his hands and secure the definitions. Simple facts like her father's drowning and the protagonist's inexperience with adult life soon become tenuous concepts for the reader, too, as we watch a slippery and fantastical coming-of-age story take shape. Nora Mahony

The Last Supper

By Rachel Cusk

Faber, £8.99

Fed up with the stark predictability of suburban Bristol, the prizewinning novelist Rachel Cusk, her husband and two young daughters sell their house and decamp to Italy for three months (or maybe longer), with thrillingly little certainty about their future. Contemplating the Renaissance art, landscapes and people she meets around the country, Cusk seeks the antidote to beige modernity, which she quickly finds in "beauty", but of a specific kind, as beheld by a very specific kind of person. This pretentious attitude undermines her ideal of "beauty in everyday things". Her brusque dismissal of the not-masterpiece, and her adolescent sneering at strangers and tourists who are not "of a superior kind", ultimately say more about her than about anything – or anyone – else. But Cusk is confident in her abilities – her ornate prose is pretty and rich, overflowing with similes – and she approaches her surroundings with a bright curiosity, minus the usual romanticism; it does not promise salvation; it is, simply, elsewhere. Daniel Bolger

Travels with a Typewriter: A Reporter at Large

By Michael Frayn

Faber £8.99

Michael Frayn is a quality journalist in the best sense of the word. This collection of his travel writing is taut and polished, with the sense of a measured hand at the tiller. It is a series of occasional articles he wrote for the Observerabout places that caught his irrepressible attention. Frayn says he struggled early in his career to keep himself out of his pieces, but given that these are travel articles, and invariably are as much about the perceptions of the person with the pen as about the place itself, he admits defeat. The results are deftly effective, the product of a career spent looking and interpreting strange views for those whose link to the outside world came through the pages of a newspaper. My favourite chapter is the introduction, and his brilliantly illustrative stories from his early days in a newsroom, but that's a completely biased preference. A collection to savour, then. Laurence Mackin

The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War I

By Miranda Carter

Penguin, £9.99

The three protagonists of the title are George V of Britain, William II of Germany and Nicholas II of Russia. Their story is "a saga of an extended and often dysfunctional family, set in a tiny, glittering, solipsistic, highly codified world". But the Europe of their time was moving from an age of empire to an age of democracy, and the first World War greatly accelerated that process. Carter skilfully shows how all three men were anachronisms and how their education and personalities ill-fitted them for their changing world. She covers a broad sweep of European history from 1860 to 1920. Much of it will be familiar, having been often told before, but rather than seeing history in terms of grand impersonal forces Carter reintroduces the idea of how quirks of personality can contribute to major historic turning points. She is an accomplished storyteller, and this is a highly readable narrative. Brian Maye