Philip Roth Everyman Vintage, £6.99Taking his title from the line of 15th-century morality plays and using the funeral of his nameless protagonist as his reference point, Philip Roth examines the man's life and gradual descent into the grave via a number of prosaic hospital visits.
Here is a character seemingly as plain as Roth has ever imagined, a man who even describes himself as "square". This is one writer, however, who does not do "square". His protagonist has been a success in his professional career, cavorting around the Caribbean with his young lover, despised by his two sons, before ending up "unbearably alone" in a sterile retirement home. Distinctly lacking in faith, this tight, beautifully structured novel prods at life's finiteness and does so with all the style you would expect from an American master. Life is too much, too chaotic, while the real horror of death, Roth is saying, is its banality. - Tom Cooney
Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China
John Man
Bantam, £8.99
When he became Mongol emperor in 1260, Kublai Khan was faced with the delicate task of managing the vast empire his grandfather Genghis had created, and he left an incredible legacy when he died in 1294. Among his many conquests, he defeated the Song in southern China to unite north and south China under the Yuan Dynasty. And his influence still defines modern Asian politics: he conquered Tibet and moved his capital to Beijing in 1263. Man's fascinating biography portrays a leader who could be just as ruthless as his forebears but who was open to new ideas. Kublai was influenced by Buddhism and Confucianism and was a skilled administrator, but his openness to Chinese culture led to resentment among more traditional Mongols. Kublai's expansion was finally halted in Japan and in later years he struggled to retain control of a realm that at its peak represented a fifth of the world's land mass. - Mark Rodden
My Mother's Lovers
Christopher Hope
Atlantic, £7.99
Although classed as fiction, this large, satisfying work smacks of lived life. Halfway through the book word reaches narrator Alexander Healey in Malaysia that his mother, is going into hospital in Johannesburg. She dies, and without a gramme of false sentiment the rest of the book takes the reader through post-Mandela Africa - not just South Africa. Ambivalence can be a nasty cover for denial, but here it is the only truthful response to the calculated and arbitrary violence that spills over into the many - sometimes funny - interracial and political incidents. Although there is a tone of exploratory concern, there are many wonderful set-pieces. The book's leisurely style is strangely reminiscent of sundowners on the porch, but that proves a useful mask for submerged anger. - Kate Bateman
China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation
James Kynge
Phoenix £9.99
China's economic ascent is, in Kynge's words, "the biggest economic event of the second half of the 20th century". The German steel mills of the Ruhr, the medieval textile towns of Tuscany and the Illinois heartland of the US's machine tools industry have all suffered severe decline as Chinese competition grows. Kynge talks to the new breed of Chinese entrepreneurs, such as a former peasant farmer who started with a backyard furnace and had the audacity to buy, transport to China and reassemble the huge ThyssenKrupp steel mill from Dortmund. The book is full of fascinating economic facts and figures, all diligently sourced, but its greatest strength lies in the detailed interviews, for example one in which a woman tells how her identity and 10 years of her life were stolen by a grasping local Communist Party official. This is journalism at its best: relevant, provocative, balanced and highly readable. - Tom Moriarty
Nora: An Ordinary Girl from Inchicore, A Memoir
Nora Szechy
iUniverse, $18.95
The victim memoir has become a staple of the book world but Nora Szechy (née Wright) born in Inchicore, Dublin, in 1932 tells a very matter-of-fact story of a working class childhood where disease, death and poverty were only a hair's breadth away. She and her nine siblings were reared in a two-bedroom house, ruled over by an autocratic matriarch and a passive, placid father. Surviving three major childhood illnesses, Nora, like her siblings, left school early and started handing over wages to her mother. Failed love affairs with a Mr Gentleman and a Protestant medical student see her leave for the US, taking two orphans from an unmarried mother's home to a new life in Michigan. A portrait of a doughty, resourceful family on the way up, and, despite some inane detail, all the more striking for its non-analytical statement of how things were. - Yvonne Nolan
On War
Carl von Clausewitz
Oxford World's Classics, £8.99
Von Clausewitz's classic has been studied by military leaders since its first publication in 1832. Critics have long charged that his military ideas, drawn from the era of the Napoleonic wars, have little light to shed on modern warfare. Today, war is conducted against non-state organisations as well as against sovereign nations: the introduction points out that word "terrorism" does not appear in On War. But von Clausewitz's starting point, that war is the continuation of politics by other means, explains the motivation of anyone who resorts to arms. As a philosophy of war, rather than a manual for its conduct, the book remains relevant. It has been abridged, removing sections made dated by technological progress. An opinionated introduction sets the book in the context of military literature. - Ralph Benson