A round-up of the latest paperback releases
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Harper Perennial, £7.99
You can see and smell the sights and scents of Nigeria in Adichie's compelling first novel. Her heroine is 15-year-old Kambili, who lives with her mother, her brother and her father, a Catholic patriarch and factory owner, who is well-respected in the community but at home is a violent religious fanatic. Ironically, a military coup in the country proves a godsend to Kambili, prolonging a visit to her aunt's house where she experiences the noise, laughter and warmth of a real home, and begins to see the possibility of another kind of life. Within a simple story, calmly told, Adichie explores the first stirrings of sexual desire, the complicated ties of family and country, the legacy of colonialism and the effects of family violence and religious fundamentalism. With its vivid descriptions and deftly constructed narrative, it bodes well for its author, who is still in her 20s.
Cathy Dillon
Ring Road: There's No Place Like Home by Ian Sansom, Harper Perennial, £7.99
Sansom's novel of small-town life in Northern Ireland sees Big Davey Quinn, the seventh son of a seventh son, return home after 20 years, his local fame as a result of his miracle birth still intact. However, time has had its way with his birthplace, symbolised by the new ring road which encircles its inhabitants. Two decades have also seen a change in the fortunes of the town's major characters, with old rivalries and past regrets still simmering beneath the surface. Sansom weaves his story around these individuals, with Bob Savory and Frank Gilbey representing wealth and power, Francie McGinn embodying unbridled faith while Billy Nibbs still chases his youthful dreams in vain. Sansom's observations are full of warmth and humour, and he depicts ordinary existence as a tragi-comic experience we are all fated to live through.
Tom Cooney
Mansfield by CK Stead, Vintage, £7.99
If it was not peppered with famous names - TS Eliot, DH and Frieda Lawrence, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell - and, if its setting - civilian London and France during the first World War - was not so fascinating, this novel would be dull. Stead, a distinguished New Zealand writer-scholar, has written a fictionalised partial-biography of Katherine Mansfield - also a New Zealander. It strives to make her affairs, especially while she was John Middleton Murry's partner, the stuff of a novel. Three men are foregrounded: her lover, poet Francis Carco; her brother, Leslie; and her would-be lover, Fred Goodyear. The last two were killed in the war, and their deaths were profoundly felt. If we are to believe the author, Katherine Mansfield heeded what they had to say and went on to write The Aloe, but one wonders how her interior thoughts and feelings come to be rendered in such amplified detail.
Kate Bateman
The Beast in the Garden by David Baron, W. W. Norton, $14.95
US towns sprawl deeper into the diminishing wilderness, magnifying a dangerous dynamic: humans spreading out, nature moving in. Journalist David Baron charts this, in his factual tale of humans and wild animals getting too close for comfort. In idyllic Boulder, Colorado, normally nocturnal, people-shy mountain lions start roaming the streets in daylight. At first this pleases most of the liberal and environmentally conscious populace. Soon, however, pets and livestock go missing, then a lion lunches on an 18-year-old schoolboy. Baron sketches all the events in detail and frames the problem with an extensive history of America's encounters with nature on the frontier. At times his digressions are over-long and portions of the book are a little dull. However, it is an invaluable account of a growing problem in America, and goes far beyond the usual simplistic debate.
Larry Ryan
The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler,Penguin, £6.99
Readers can be divided into two groups: those who love Jane Austen and those who don't. The majority of the Jane Austen Book Club love the majority of Austen's books. The group's members are not looking for the big answers in life and their lives appear unremarkable, like those of many of Austen's characters. But that is where a good novelist will find the story - in the bits where nothing much seems to be happening. Fowler does this wonderfully, creating some singular people whose own stories are worthy of Austen. Their fears and frailties are revealed gradually, unself-consciously, within the group and are soothed by the often surprising friendships they find there. This is one of those lovely books one begins reading out of curiosity and keeps reading out of a desire to see all made right in the world of the people we come to care about.
Claire Looby
Catherine de Medici by Leonie Frieda, Phoenix, £8.99
Was Catherine de Medici a heroic woman with proven political skills and a superb strategist? Or was she a ruthless conspirator, a despot, or the engineer of a massacre? If we accept Frieda's findings, she was all of these and much more besides. A princess at 14, she suffered cruelly as her new husband, Henri II, was bewitched by his lifelong mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Nevertheless, he found enough time and inclination to sleep with Catherine for her to conceive 10 children, three of whom became King of France. Indeed Catherine's fatal flaw appears to have been her blind devotion to her sickly and corrupt children. This is Frieda's first biography and she has obviously researched it thoroughly - perhaps too thoroughly, for the detail is occasionally wearying. Nevertheless, it is skilfully written and on balance sympathetic to Catherine's stewardship.
Owen Dawson