A selection of paperbacks reviewed
Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years Michael Palin Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.99
It's easy to forget that Michael Palin, now a genial, middle-aged presenter of travel programmes, was once a member of the Monty Python team, whose surreal, subversive brilliance changed the face of comedy in the 1970s. This first volume of his diaries begins in 1969 when he was 25, married with a young son, and working as a TV scriptwriter, and covers the period when he worked with the Python team on their TV series and the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Monty Python's Life of Brian. In addition to his charting of the relationships within the group and the showbiz madness into which the Pythons were plunged when they broke the US, Palin also touches on his family life. Though the book is very long and contains rather too much detail about business dealings, it's entertaining in a low-key way, and Python fans should enjoy it. - Cathy Dillon
Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction By John Sutherland Oxford University Press, £6.99
Remember Warwick Deeping? Gertrude Atherton? Lion Feuchtwanger? Their fate is what awaits Dan Brown: they all wrote massively successful books and are now almost entirely forgotten. In this breezily entertaining volume, Guardian columnist and former Man Booker judge John Sutherland (author of How to Read a Novel) asks why best-sellers should so often prove ephemeral - and concludes that the bestseller is "a literary experiment that works, for its time". His survey is full of provoking detail: did you know the CIA worked on Pasternak's behalf to make Doctor Zhivago the bestseller it became? In Sutherland's hands, the history of the bestseller becomes a condensed history of popular fiction, and hence of the dreams of two centuries of ordinary readers. - Kevin Power
Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past Giles Tremlett Faber, £8.99
Spain may be part of Europe, yet it remains eternally peripheral - its brutal civil war and subsequent fascist regime too often seen as an adjunct to the larger conflict on the rest of the continent. But as Giles Tremlett reveals in this superb travelogue around his adopted country, it is not only outsiders who overlook the crimes of the civil war - Spaniards themselves have mastered the act of forgetting. The Guardian journalist takes as his starting point the families of the Republican dead who are now demanding the excavation of the mass graves that scar the Spanish landscape. What he discovers, as he relates tales from the various regions, is a capacity to ignore the past - a capacity that has allowed Spain to become the home of Zara and Pedro Almodóvar rather than be forever stained by Franco. It is not ultimately clear, however, if Spain's ghosts can be so easily ignored. - Davin O'Dwyer
Travels in the Scriptorium Paul Auster Faber, £6.99
Mr Blank sits alone at the edge of a bed. He can't remember who he is, why he is wearing pyjamas, or how he got to this bare, white room. A pile of photographs and an unfinished manuscript lie on a table nearby. Numerous cameras are hidden all around, capturing his every move. Confused, weak and paranoid, Mr Blank is visited by several people, each stirring some vague, intangible memory. Mr Blank - like the reader - is offered tiny clues to events or choices he made in the past - some of which, it seems, may have had devastating consequences. Travels in the Scriptorium draws both reader and writer into the protagonist's desperate search to make sense of his existence. True to Auster's playful, labyrinthine style, the book is like an intriguing but somewhat dark game, challenging the reader to question old age, trust and the puzzle of memory. - Sorcha Hamilton
The Mission Song John Le Carré Hodder £6.99
Bruno "Salvo" Salvador is a highly cultured and superbly educated Anglo-African Londoner and the most unlikely offspring of an Irish Catholic missionary and a Congolese village headman's daughter. His skills as a freelance interpreter have made him much in demand by the courts, big business, immigrant aid organisations and, on occasion (this being Le Carré), a certain government department "whose existence is routinely denied". Salvo is, he cheerfully informs us, the perfect functionary, unburdened by conscience or scruples. Then an encounter with a passionate Congolese nurse and a secret assignment on a remote Scottish island throw Salvo's mercenary values into stark relief. Cynical and blackly humorous, Le Carré's 20th novel (and the first written, not completely credibly, in the first-person) is one of his angriest in its condemnation of Africa's exploitation by US and European multinationals. - Kevin Sweeney
The Apple Michel Faber Canongate, £6.99
Readers are enticed to "lose track of time - just long enough to be overtaken by 130 years" in this, Michel Faber's latest collection of short stories. Sugar, Clara and Mr Bodley, characters who charmed in Faber's international best-seller The Crimson Petal and the White, return to lure readers into Victorian London's seedy underbelly. Faber revels in presenting brothel-filled Silver Street in all its unsanitised glory. His characterisation masterfully combines more perverse elements with moments of genuine kind-heartedness.
The result? The prose of a satisfying fantasy, in a setting more typical of a gritty reality. In Christmas in Silver Street, a boy doesn't know what Christmas is. Silver Street's characters never transcend their world but defy it with their underdog morality and alluring bohemian style. - Gillian Hamill