A selection of paperbacks reviewed
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers Yiyun Li
Harper Perennial, £7.99
This remarkable collection of stories from Chinese-American writer Yiyun Li offers a rare insight into a country coming to terms with its place in the modern world. A worthy winner of the inaugural Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, Li has created a series of unconventional love stories that throws into relief the conflict between tradition and modernity at the heart of contemporary Chinese society. From the successful son who returns from America to tell his mother he is gay, to the young man with the face of Chairman Mao, Li's characters struggle to exist within the boundaries of accepted behaviour in a land where until recently conformity was key. Ultimately each must look for answers in the personal relationships that are worth "a thousand years of good prayers". It will not be easy but for better or for worse, Li suggests, this is the China of the future. - Freya McClements
Tête-à-Tête
Hazel Rowley
Vintage Books, £8.99
With a winning combination of strong narrative, thorough research, and sensational anecdote, Rowley sheds new light on that famous partnership of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. She certainly has a plethora of material to work from - these two were at least as prolific in their personal correspondence as in their literature: art and reality seem to intermingle in a heady whirl of ideological revolution. Rowley's exploration is sensitive, even sympathetic, though never indulgent: despite the apparent selfishness and indeed sordidness of their relationships, one is left with the unshakeable sense of real pioneers, who broke with convention and forged new frameworks for human relationships and self-definition - sometimes at great personal cost. - Claire Anderson Wheeler
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
Lewis Wolpert
Faber & Faber, £8.99
Do you touch wood when you tempt fate? So do I. And so, as he freely admits, does the evolutionary biologist Lewis Wolpert. But why do so many of us believe such daft things? Wolpert suggests that it has to do with the evolution of the human brain and in particular with our use of tools. We like to rationalise, and explain everything that happens in causal terms, even when the explanations are - scientifically speaking - for the birds. In this enjoyable, compendium of arcane information and stylish argument, Wolpert applies his cool eye and dry wit to a wide range of everyday beliefs about everything from the viability of the human embryo through religious beliefs to whether brainwashing works the way we think it does. No, is the short answer. (Touch wood. . .) - Arminta Wallace
Mother's Milk
Edward St Aubyn
Picador, £7.99
Shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, Mother's Milk is primarily a novel about parenthood in which Edward St Aubyn returns to the dysfunctional Melrose family of his 1990s trilogy, Some Hope. We first hear the voice of five-year-
old Robert, whose reluctance to leave his infancy behind is exacerbated by the birth of his brother and a growing awareness of the cracks in his parents' marriage. Later, the narrative is taken over by his father, Patrick, who resents his wife's devout attention to their newborn son. We also get a glimpse of Mary's life, that of an estranged, exhausted wife unable to think beyond her duty as mother. As Patrick becomes reacquainted with a former lover and starts drinking heavily, his dying mother adds further complication to his increasingly confused state. Set during a series of holidays in France and the US, Mother's Milk is a witty and at times touching portrait of family life. - Sorcha Hamilton
Scamorama: Turning the Tables on Email Scammers
Eve Edelson
The Disinformation Company,
£9.99
Have you ever unexpectedly won millions in the Spanish lotto or been chosen at random to take safe custody of the accumulated wealth of a dead African dictator's widow? Isn't there some small part of you that wants to believe it's true? It's not. You'd be a "mugu" (victim) to be taken in and many are. It's a Nigerian-style "419" scam - named after the relevant section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code. The scammers mercilessly exploit human gullibility. Scamorama describes the exploits of anti-scammers, amateur jokers who take the wretches on, pretending to be innocent mugs, and utterly waste their time for weeks on end, often extracting gifts and humiliating photos from them. The e-mail jousts printed here are often hilarious, the anti- scammers inventing comic personae for themselves to lead the "lads" on. Scamorama is blunt, informative - and very funny. - Tom Moriarty
Constantinople: City of the World's Desire, 1453-1924
Philip Mansel
John Murray, £10.99
In a meticulously researched, warts-and-all tribute to the city of Constantinople while mostly in Muslim hands, Mansel explores the chasm, gateway and illusion that separates east from west, recreating life in the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on extensive sources, the narrative takes the reader from the moment Mehmed II first embraced the fallen city in 1453, to its post-first World War occupation and zonal division (a la Berlin or Vienna), and what were the last days of one of Europe's great capitals. Covering all the great tensions, wars and royal shenanigans, among many other adventures in a 471-year history, this is a bulky investigation that swings between the great palaces of power and gives a timely insight into how Greek, Jew, Christian and Muslim once lived in peace. - Paul O'Doherty