October Sky by Homer H. Hickam (Fourth Estate, £6.99 in UK)

In October 1957 Sputnik streaked across the skies and into the frightened minds of America, and as it passed over the coal towns of West Virginia its inspiration changed the life of one 14-year-old, Homer H. Hickam. Homer vowed to one day work with Wernher von Braun, and with his friends began the great adventure that was the Big Creek Missile Agency. But the Cold War was on, a coal war was brewing in the town and Homer was at war with his adolescent self. Hickam's splendid, absorbing memoir of coming of age in the Space Age is akin to How Green Was My Valley meets Buck Rogers. Sharply observed and enormously comic at times, it has moments that are searingly painful and it never descends into sentimentality: boy doesn't get girl, and his parents' strained relationship survives only as a certain accommodation. A brilliant read.