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The Misfortunates, By Dimitri Verhulst

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Reminiscent of the TV series Shameless in its portrayal of an anarchic working-class family, Dimitri Verhulst's semi-auto-biographical novel is set in a nondescript Flemish town, "an ugly backwater, but a great place for drizzle and pigeon fancying". It centres on the dysfunctional childhood of 13-year old Dimmy, who lives in his grandmother's house with his workshy, alcoholic father and equally inebriated uncles. Their squalid existence is worn like a badge of honour: "We were poor, always had been, but we bore our poverty with pride. A flash car in front of the house was a humiliation".

The Bellwether Revivals, By Benjamin Wood

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

There are some lessons publishers never learn. When presenting a new author, editors have long been unable to avoid slipping in a phrase calculated to get up the noses of many in the room: "Of course, it doesn't hurt that he or (she) is very easy on the eye!" Simon & Schuster may not be guilty of such tactics, but that images of Benjamin Wood's beautiful hair and long eyelashes are becoming familiar is probably not regarded as a sales disincentive. But can this Lancashire-born creative-writing lecturer deliver the goods? Is The Bellwether Revivals worthy of the hype?

Zona, By Geoff Dyer

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Stalker – a 1979 film by the Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky – is now the subject of a book by the novelist and essay-writer Geoff Dyer. He's long been absorbed by it, and understandably so: this lengthy, eerie, philosophical science fiction (which resists most sci-fi conventions) can take a strange hold. It's about three men on a journey. Stalker guides Professor and Writer into the mysterious, restricted area of the Zone. Inside, there's a Room, which grants your innermost desire.

The Divine Comedy, By Craig Raine

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Craig Raine's The Divine Comedy is a game of two halves. (Dante's was one of three thirds.) His subject – the "basic grammar of sex" – is boldly and baldly put: "Body parts – his body parts in her body part, their body parts in her body part." Raine's second act aims to inject these parts with some art: "The entire glans was not revealed – only the tip with its goldfish mouth. The penis in its polo neck."

Alys, Always, By Harriet Lane

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Frances Thorpe, a sub-editor on the books pages of the Questioner, is one of those quiet women it's advisable to watch. A thirty-something living alone in a shabby north London flat, she's stuck in a job that she thinks is drudgery, and her social life is going nowhere. So when fate presents an opportunity, she takes it.

The Spirit of the Game, By Mihir Bose

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Those critical of modern society are fond of harking back to supposed golden pasts. Pre-industrial Merrie England and the imagined court of King Arthur have both been extolled as utopias.

The God Species, By Mark Lynas

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Mark Lynas's thesis is that the green movement is right in its diagnosis but disastrously wrong in its prescriptions.

The Brothers, By Asko Sahlberg (trs by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

At only 122 pages, this is a short but intense novel set in icy, rural Finland, 1809.

The Visiting Angel, By Paul Wilson

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

I must confess that I had never heard of Paul Wilson until I was sent this to review, but The Visiting Angel is his sixth novel and on the strength of it alone, he deserves to be much, much better known.

Shapely Ankle Preferred, By Francesca Beauman

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Shapely Ankle Preferred is a diverting trawl through four centuries of lonely hearts ads, from the first recorded instance (London, 1695) to the present-day, offering glimpses of changing mores.

Bar Balto, By Faiza Guene (trs Sarah Ardizzone)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Joel Morvier is a racist, lecherous, thieving bar-owner in the deprived banlieu of Making-Ends-Meet, who is found naked and dead in a pool of blood from multiple stab wounds.

The Train in the Night: A Story of Music and Loss, By Nick Coleman

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Unexpected losses and self-contemplation traditionally go together. So when Nick Coleman, a middle-aged music lover and critic, formerly of this paper, lost hearing function in one ear, his entire relationship with his life's most consistent pleasure was challenged. This wasn't comedy deafness, the selective hearing beloved of sitcom writers, but an endless internal soundtrack that maddeningly never ceased and very often felt like explosions within his skull. Worse still, he could no longer make sense of sound. Old favourites no longer offered the slightest emotional connection, while assimilating new material was impossible.

The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, By Faramerz Dabhoiwala

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

In 1644, a young married woman called Mary Latham was hanged after being found guilty of adultery. This was in Massachusetts, but public laws and attitudes towards sexual behaviour weren't far behind in England. In 1552, Archbishop Cranmer advocated life imprisonment or exile for adulterers, while one Christian writer, Philip Stubbes, was happy to suggest branding with hot irons.

A Card from Angela Carter, By Susannah Clapp

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

The gifted novelist and short-story writer Angela Carter died 20 years ago this month at the age of just 51. Many of her reviews and essays were published in the London Review of Books, where her commissioning editor was Susannah Clapp. Carter used to send Clapp postcards from all over the world; these missives form the basis of this slender tribute.

Photography: Wildlife Photographer, By Chris Gomersall

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

As the epigraph to this inspiring "course in creative photography", Chris Gomersall has chosen Antoni Gaudi: "The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of Nature."

Jubilee, By Shelley Harris

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Published in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee year, Shelley Harris's remarkably assured debut novel is rooted in the Silver Jubilee celebrations of June 1977. Cherry Gardens, in a small Buckinghamshire village, is throwing a street party. Union Jack bunting is festooned from house to house; trestle tables will carry the vat of unappetising coronation chicken and cakes iced in red, white and blue, as well as the scrumptious chakli contributed by the Patels, who had come to Bourne Heath fleeing Idi Amin's violent expulsion of Asians from Uganda. "Do let's remember this is a particularly British celebration," antique Miss Bissett had sniffily objected to Mrs Patel's culinary offer. Her simple, patriotic reply prompts an awkward pause for the organising committee: "I am British now. She's my Queen too."

I Shall Not Hate, By Izzeldin Abuelaish

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

A Palestinian gynaecologist, Izzeldin Abuelaish, opens his memoirs with a deceptively sunny description of a family day trip to the beach. "We probably looked like any other family," writes Abuelaish, "the kids frolicking in the water... calling to each other over the onshore winds." But this gathering turns out to be not quite as it seems.

The Cry of the Go-away Bird, By Andrea Eames

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Elsie loves the farm that is her home; there is always tea in the silver teapot, the gin and tonics on the veranda. But growing up a white teenager in post-independence Zimbabwe poses some serious dilemmas.

The Greatcoat, By Helen Dunmore

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

The terror in Helen Dunmore's ghost story lurks in its title. An old serge RAF coat that a newly-wed doctor's wife finds at the back of a cupboard holds a talismanic significance. It is the object - the monkey's paw - that brings lost or trapped spirits back to life and breathes life into this post-war story of illicit desire, possession, and the guilty secrets of war.

The Dreyfus Affair, By Piers Paul Read

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Anne Sinclair recently compared her husband, Dominic Strauss-Kahn, to Alfred Dreyfus as victims of injustice. This absurdity at least confirms the centrality of Dreyfus in the French public memory, over 100 years on. The verdict against him was disgraceful. An army officer, he was accused of espionage, on the basis of forged documents and scraps of waste paper from the German embassy. He was court-martialled and sentenced at a show trial staged by the French army. The very absence of evidence was taken as confirming the guilt of this modern Judas.

The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, By Greil Marcus

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Greil Marcus records that, in 2010,listening to the radio on a regular car journey around San Francisco revealed that The Doors got more airplay than anyone else of their era, and with a greater number of songs - though they weren't a Bay Area band. As Marcus tells it, this drove him to re-assess their work and to reconsider the grotesque fetish status the 1960s have acquired as the enviable Neverland of stalled possibility, used to render impotent all that comes after.

The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, Edited by Jenny Hartley

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

Travelling in Italy in 1853, Charles Dickens wrote to Georgina Hogarth – sister of his soon-to-be estranged wife Catherine, and herself the writer's stalwart housekeeper and executor – about his efforts to order a local bubbly. Dickens, who called himself "The Inimitable", tries to find the right word in Italian for "un vino come champagne". The waiter helps him out: "spumante". "Inimitable: 'Ecco la parola. L'ho trovato!'" He had indeed found the right word. The "Sparkler of Albion" almost never ceased to fizz. Edited with unobtrusive intelligence and insight by Jenny Hartley, this bicentenary selection of his letters both celebrates his unstoppered effervescence – and lets the reader count its cost, both for the Sparkler and his loved ones.

A Small Circus, By Hans Fallada, trans. Michael Hofmann

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

In retrospect, it was unlikely that Hans Fallada (1893-1947) would ever make it to the age of 53; as his biographer Jenny Williams notes, "he lived more lives than one, clawing his way back each time... until his body was no longer able". Yet a botched suicide, numerous incarcerations and breakdowns later, Fallada sobered up enough to write the first of his many bestsellers, A Small Circus, published in Germany in 1931 as Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, or "Peasants, Bigwigs and Bombs".

Shapely Ankle Preferr'd, By Francesca Beauman

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

For those who have ever looked for love in a newspaper column, take heart, your late 17th-century ancestors were doing the same. The lonely hearts format was born in 1695, in the Matrimonials section of The Times.

Daughters-in-law, By Joanna Trollope

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:01 GMT

In recent years Joanna Trollope's fiction has been rooted in the smart urban enclaves of Hoxton, Highgate and Hammersmith. This latest work returns to the provincial territory of her earlier novels, opening in the summer blaze of an English country wedding.