The latest paperbacks reviewed.
Niels Lyhne, Jens Peter Jacobsen, trans. Tiina Nunnally Penguin Classics America, $15
Jacobsen, born in Jutland in 1847, is one of the masters of Scandinavian literature, and Niels Lyhne, as Tiina Nunnally's superb translation shows, is his masterpiece. His other great interest was science - he translated Darwin into Danish - but he had to abandon his scientific studies when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1874. He devoted himself to writing, and set himself to refining and aestheticising the novel form. Niels Lyhne, described by Rilke as "a book of splendours and depths", is a portrait of the artist, his work and his loves, a masterly amalgam of 19th-century romanticism and timeless realism. At the age of 38, Jacobsen left Copenhagen and returned to his birthplace where, as the final line of Niels Lyhne has it, "he died the death - the difficult death". John Banville
Nature Cure, Richard Mabey, Pimlico, £7.99
Richard Mabey is one of Britain's most established nature writers and his bestseller Flora Britannica won both the British Book Awards' Illustrated Book of the Year and the Botanical Society of the British Isles' President's Award. In this autobiographical book, he describes how he pulled himself out of severe depression that had ground his life to a halt for more than two years. He writes about the landscape that surrounds him - first the Chiltern Hills and then the flatlands of Norfolk - in intricate detail and about how the process of reawakening his interest in writing about nature helped him recover from his illness. He shares with readers an incredible knowledge of flora, fauna and rural traditions. However, ultimately, he left little space for what must have been the greatest part of his cure, the loving relationship he began with Polly as he reopened himself to people following the worst phase of his depression. Sylvia Thompson
The Beach Bar, Kate McCabe, Poolbeg Press, €14.99
Under the Costa del Sol's unwavering sun, nestled among the restaurants and beach huts of Fuengirola, sits Pedro's Bar, managed by the faithful Maria and the recent acquisition of a young Dublin businesswoman. In Kate McCabe's scintillating read, the bar becomes a meeting place for a group of strangers who become friends. Some are trying to recapture the thrills of past summers, while others are retreating to the sun to recover from a personal tragedy. In the course of their stay, they discover that life in the sun is a heady mixture of the spectacular and the mundane. Written with a real love of the location and a keen insight into the people drawn to it, this is a sure-fire winner for holidaymakers. Pack it now. Claire Looby
In The Fold, Rachel Cusk, Faber & Faber £7.99
Novelist Rachel Cusk has a unique talent for describing the moment. The fleeting thoughts of Michael, on his way to a party, are captured with an easy precision, drawing you into this meandering narrative without knowing exactly where it is going. The chaotic, bohemian ambience of his friend's family home, otherwise known as "Egypt", fills Michael with a sense of youthful optimism. Years later, life with his estranged and frequently volatile wife never seems to match up to his memory of the farm. Returning to "Egypt", this time with his young son, Michael comes up against a different side to life in the rustic setting, where an exhilarating moment in the past fades rapidly into a dull reality. While at times thin on narrative development, the distant tone of the novel is punctuated by Cusk's descriptive flair which creeps up in flashes of brilliance. Sorcha Hamilton
The Short Life & Long Times of Mrs Beeton, Kathryn Hughes, Harper Perennial, £7.99
Brightly written and meticulously researched, this book is both a thoughtful exploration of the life of the iconic Mrs Beeton, and a fascinating exposé of the surrounding era.
It dismantles the popular "domestic goddess" image, replacing it with a striking picture of a young, inexperienced girl, remarkably ill-qualified for her ordained role as the voice of matronly instruction. Hughes demonstrates that Isabella Beeton's phenomenal success was actually due, not to her material's originality or superiority, but to her timely identification of a new niche in the market - the fast-expanding middle classes of newly industrialised Britain - and an understanding of its needs and fears: Mrs Beeton spoke to a generation of women seeking guidance as they embarked on lives radically different from those of their forebears. Claire Anderson-Wheeler
The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa, Shawn Levy, Harper Perennial, £7.99
As Levy's kiss-and-tell, well-researched, if typical biography recounts, Porfirio Rubirosa was a supreme chancer who brazened his masculinity at polo, motor-racing and gambling, usually with someone else's horse, someone else's car, someone else's money and, more often than not, with someone else's wife. And, like many of life's great playboys, "Rubi" had more luck than a farmyard of cockerels. The Dominican Republic's most famous lover, when not presenting or cashing in on his diplomatic credentials, toyed, bedded and manipulated some of the world's most eligible (and gullible) trophies. Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kim Novak, Christina Onassis, among many others, all enjoyed the pleasure of what Truman Capote described as "an 11-inch café-au-lait sinker as thick as a man's wrist", and what photographer Jerome Zerbe called "Yul Brynner in a black turtleneck". Ultimately, a story for airport-cads or those in a one-book library. Paul O'Doherty