Paperbacks: Accidents in the Home<br></br>The Sex Life of My Aunt<br></br>Bodies<br></br>The Child that Books Built<br></br>Language in Danger

Accidents in the Home by Tessa Hadley (Vintage, £6.99, 245pp)

Most serious accidents happen in the home. Tessa Hadley's nine interrelated stories of modern family life brilliantly illustrate just how lethal our random couplings can be.

The novel opens with what appears to be a tale of everyday adultery. Clare Menges is a provincial mum who juggles domesticity with half-hearted academic ambitions. One lunchtime her glamorous best friend, Helly, turns up with another new boyfriend in tow – one who slept with Clare in a long-ago teenage past. The two metropolitans settle themselves into Clare's chaotic home, watching as their hostess makes soup for her brainy offspring and priggish husband.

After the visit, David gets in contact, and, like a latter-day Madame Bovary, Clare soon finds herself responding to his renewed overtures. Later, on an illicit trip to London – her new underwear slithering "strangely" under her normal clothes – Clare's thoughts turn to Emma and Rodolphe's "Big Fuck". Like any 19th-century heroine, she knows she'll pay for her curiosity.

Clare's compelling narrative is intertwined with other stories of her extended family – her difficult sister, hippie stepmothers and depressive in-laws. A wonderfully observant writer, Hadley can sum up an entire relationship in the slam of a car door or swing of an earring. Details of domestic crisis and parental meltdown are wince-makingly familiar. Like all satisfying fiction, this début manages to entertain and say something about the way we are now.

The Sex Life of My Aunt by Mavis Cheek (Faber & Faber, £10.99, 282pp)

Top drawer romantic comedy, Mavis Cheek's tenth novel examines the cost (particularly to the heroine's Peter Jones card ) of an adulterous liaison between a west London housewife and an attractive, penurious younger man. Dilys has been married since her early twenties, but her heart sinks at the prospect of a life-time of mini-breaks in Bath with a man in a blazer. Instead she falls for a stranger on a train, and, Brief Encounter-style, prepares to send "a bomb rolling right slap bang down the middle" of her marriage. Dilys soon discovers which side her bread is buttered.

Bodies by Jed Mercurio (Vintage, £6.99, 359pp)

Just as ER manages to keep a good medical story on the road without much else to distract, so does Jed Mercurio, a doctor turned writer whose début novel takes up the cause of the junior doctor with grim gusto. The novel is set in a teaching hospital in the Midlands, and tells the story of a new house-man scared to death that he will have to put his training into practice. Surviving on sugar and canteen tea, and on call 100 hours a week, the nameless narrator moves from one unimaginable emergency to the next. There's a little relationship trauma en route too, but centre stage is Mercurio's startling catalogue of physical malfunction.

The Child that Books Built by Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber, £7.99, 211pp)

Just how Puffin and Peacock editions of Jane Gardam, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ian Seraillier and C S Lewis coloured the imaginations of a generation of children is the subject of Francis Spufford's passionate and idiosyncratic memoir of a bookish childhood. His account is not so much a nostalgic trip around the forests of Narnia or the islands of Earthsea, but an attempt to understand why and how he read, and what he took from his encounters. Also buried in here is the story of the author's rivalry with his sister, Bridget and his first encounters with science fiction, horror and pornography.

Language in Danger by Andrew Dalby (Penguin, £8.99, 329pp)

One of the Earth's 5,000-plus languages dies out every fortnight. We sometimes know about the person who takes it to the grave – John Davey of Zennor (d. 1891), who spoke Cornish, or Tevfik Esenç, last native speaker of the Caucasian tongue Ubuykh, which expired on 8 October 1992. Andrew Dalby's hugely informative survey makes the case that the loss of diversity in human speech threatens our planet's resources in the same way as the loss of habitats and species. Different tongues guard different world-views. But Dalby does find time to dissolve that cherished myth about the 50-odd Inuit words for "snow". There are, basically, four.