Jane Austen, by David Nokes (Fourth Estate, £9.99 in UK)

On the face of it, the life of Jane Austen would seem to offer poor material for a gossipy biography - all those country clergymen, all those sedate walks, all that letter-writing. David Nokes takes the widest possible angle on his subject, opening with the Indian sojourn of an unhappy uncle by marriage and making great use of a shoplifting aunt and two seafaring brothers, but such occasional exotic splashes cannot in themselves account for the sparkling colours of Nokes's portrait; his sharp wit and unfailingly lively style play their parts, too, giving the details of daily life a compulsive readability which can only be described as Austen-esque. Sympathetic without being sycophantic, he delivers surprise after surprise - this is not the saintly maiden aunt to whom we have become accustomed, but the woman who wrote in a letter to her sister Cassandra: "If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it. It is not my fault".