It's hard for Steve Jones to be optimistic; he knows too much. He has already explained the complexities of genetics (DNA is his speciality) to us in books such as the readable and entertaining The Language of the Genes. His characteristic dry humour almost fails him now, however, as he grapples with the dread spectre of climate change.
Coral - A Pessimist in Paradise Steve Jones
Abacus £8.99
Jones explains how minute creatures, polyps, "small bags with tentacles", patiently build the oceans' beautiful coral reefs and atolls. The coral reefs are "the rainforests of the sea" but, from nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll and Mururoa to man-made global warming, we are destroying them too. Read his final, pessimistic chapter and weep.
Tom Moriarty
Edith Wharton
Hermione Lee
Vintage, £10.99
In this authoritative biography, Oxford academic Hermione Lee seeks to free Edith Wharton from the widely-held misconception that she was a purveyor of genteel nostalgia. Instead, Lee argues, attention should focus on the many years Wharton spent in Europe, in the course of which she revealed herself to be a lively, passionate, and fiercely modern woman. This is a well-written and comprehensive study - particularly when dealing with the background to two of Wharton's best-known titles, The House of Mirthand The Age of Innocence- and Lee is a master of the telling detail: one highlight is Wharton's dismissal of Joyce's Ulysses as "a turgid welter of schoolboy pornography". But despite such insights, this biography may be more for serious scholars than for the general reader.
Freya McClements
Wild: An Elemental Journey
Jay Griffiths
Penguin, £8.99
Has modern society domesticated us like caged animals? Imprisoned in a world of concrete, have we exiled ourselves from the natural world and lost part of our humanity in the process? In Wild, Griffiths argues that we have, and testifies to a primal urge within each of us to answer the call of the wilderness. This untameable instinct inspires the author's epic globe-trotting adventure - encompassing the Amazonian rainforests, the icy depths of the Arctic and the scorching plains of the Australian Outback. Immersing herself in the indigenous cultures of Native American, Inuit and Aboriginal people, Griffiths witnesses the devastation wrought by white settlers on once unspoilt landscapes. In carrying the torch for endangered cultures, Griffiths assumes the mantle of an ecological poet, exposing the Inconvenient Truths of our dying world.
Kevin Cronin
Paper Houses: A Memoir of the '70s and Beyond
Michèle Roberts
Virago Press, £8.99
In 1973, some time between living in a Holloway commune and paying £5 for a room in Peckham, Michèle Roberts decided to dedicate her life to writing. Three years earlier, she had graduated from Oxford and started as a trainee librarian in the British Museum. Thus began her love affair with London and the revolutionaries she found there. She embraced this radical way of living but struggled to find her own identity within it: it came to her ultimately through writing. Throughout the 1970s Roberts combined her life's passions by writing for iconic counter-culture publications such as Oz, Spare Rib and Gay News while working on her own books and short stories. This journey, from a lost, young girl to an accomplished and respected author, is traced in Paper Houses. Carefully side-stepping nostalgia, Roberts delivers an exciting and matter-of-fact account of an imperfect - but idealistic - London.
Diarmuid Carter
The Opposite House
Helen Oyeyemi
Bloomsbury, £7.99
In her second novel, Oyeyemi returns to the complex and rewarding themes that arose in The Icarus Girl: identity, displacement and loss in a multicultural world. Maja moved to London at age six, but Cuba remains a constant presence for her, a world of the mind. Pregnancy prompts Maja to take stock of her life; the result for the reader is a strong-voiced narrative which observes the interplay of cultural and family dynamics in all their complexity. The atmosphere is rich, the characters minutely observed. What stands out here, though, is the prose, which is vibrant, dream-like; almost tropically lush. Oyeyemi clearly has a passion for language, with sentences of frequently arresting beauty. The danger is that such writing may become too infatuated with its own possibilities, and leave the reader feeling somewhat excluded.
Claire Anderson-Wheeler
The Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Non-Believers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound
Jack Huberman
Nation Books, $15.95
Jack Huberman's follow-up to his best-selling The Bush-Haterswas prompted by a weariness of religious fundamentalists in the US and a desire to help arm hell-bound non-believers in their battle against free-quoting Bible bashers. By, occasionally, taking quotes out of context Huberman shows he has at least learned something from his foes. That said, this is a thought-provoking and witty gathering of quips and quotes by notable free-thinkers throughout the ages. All the usual suspects - Kant, Satre, Marx (Karl), Lennon (John), Hawking and Nietzsche - are present, joined by a variety of poets, playwrights, actors and philosophers. Jesus Christ, Martin Luther, a plethora of popes and Mother Theresa might be surprised by their inclusion. No doubt they would contend they were quoted out of context.
Martin Noonan