Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis (Picador, £6.99 in UK)

The fourth novel from Bret Easton Ellis, and his first since American Psycho (1991), amounts to a deadpan extravaganza of deceptive skill. It stars Victor, our narrator, a goodlooking wannabe stupid enough to think the PLO are a 1970s pop group; his main claim to existence is being a supermodel's boyfriend. Glamorama reads as two novels joined, admittedly somewhat unevenly. A cleverly observed, of-the-minute social satire which takes superficiality as an art form for its central thesis, it is also a hectic, moralistic thriller in which the potential evil of surreal physical perfection is explored in a chaotic study of depravity. When a friend returns from climbing Everest, one character reports "there were two deaths. She lost her cell phone." The adventures of Victor and his walking-dead, party-animal, semi-human buddies reads like an offbeat, marathon and heavily improvised screenplay; the prose is functional and the plotting random, but it all succeeds thanks to the dialogue and Ellis's grasp of the absurd. Far superior to the heaving, laboured fiction of Tom Wolfe, it's well worth reading.