Paperbacks: Arlington ParkTintin and the Secret of LiteratureDaniel Isn't Talking The IslamistMonksA Sense of the World

Arlington Park, by Rachel Cusk (FABER £7.99)

The opening of this novel, a powerful description of a rainstorm sweeping in on the English suburb of Arlington Park one night, shows Cusk's writing at its very best. The rain makes people lying in their beds "feel somehow observed, as if a dark audience had assembled outside and were looking in through the windows, clapping their hands". In a few crisp sentences, Cusk stakes out her territory: the closely observed world of the paranoid middle-classes. The sound of the storm feeds the nightmare that someone, somewhere, is watching and judging them.

The story takes place over a single day and follows the lives of several women. Juliet, an English teacher at a girls' public school, finds herself quietly at war with her husband, who teaches at a notorious comprehensive, and whose students miraculously achieve excellent exam results. Amanda drags her obnoxious infant Eddie around town while she obsesses about domestic chores and why her life is so gloomy since she and her husband moved into their dream-home. Solly Kerr-Leigh (not pronounced Curly) steadily balloons with her fourth child while a glamorous Italian woman takes residence in the family's spare room.

If you're female, your family earns well in excess of the national average and your children are all apparently named after monks or nuns, you may read this book and sob with relief that someone's lifted the lid on your painful domestic arrangements. The rest of us might only be able to muster a shrug.

Tintin and the Secret of Literature, by Tom McCarthy (GRANTA £8.99)

Many English intellectuals still tend to look on the work of French cultural theorists like Barthes, Derrida and Foucault with scepticism, if not disdain. It's therefore a cause for celebration when a book like this one comes along. Although McCarthy's obsessively close readings of Hergé's Tintin stories aren't really pitched much higher than the level of a precocious undergraduate thesis, they're written with such freedom and verve that it's hard not to start looking at all books in the same way.

Barthes wrote that a text could be analysed in terms of its hermeneutic code: the aspects of it that "constitute an enigma and lead to its solution"; and nearly all Tintin's adventures are based around enigmas. No wonder the young reporter is often wrongly described as a detective. Derrida's thoughts on economy (far too complex to summarise here) lead to a discussion of how Captain Haddock's destiny mirrors "the Odyssean circuit, the path of Ulysses".

So what? you cry. This is the path to madness! Maybe it is, but along the way there are all kinds of possibilities for intellectual adventure and discovery. A writer like Derrida deployed his vast intellectual resources and knowledge of philosophy through a filter of playfulness and poetry. McCarthy's laid-back style achieves something similar. Whether he might have been better off focusing on work with more depth than Tintin is a moot point. The result probably wouldn't have been as readable.

Daniel Isn't Talking, by Marti Leimbach (HARPER PERENNIAL £6.99)

American-born Melanie Marsh is married to Stephen, a reserved Englishman with an equally frosty family. Melanie and Stephen have been married five years, but her name remains written in pencil on the family tree; after all, the family point out, he'd been seeing his last girlfriend for six years before he met her, so who was to say he might not change his mind about Melanie?

The couple have two children. Emily is perfectly normal; Daniel is prone to screaming like a monkey, dragging his head along the carpet as if he were a mop and crying for inexplicable reasons. Although he's two, he doesn't talk. Melanie, consumed by anxiety starts seeing a therapist. Stephen, on the other hand, insists that Daniel is perfectly healthy - it's just a case of the "terrible twos". As soon as Daniel is diagnosed as autistic he starts accusing Melanie of negligence instead: "If you knew there was something wrong, why didn't you get help?". Before long he moves out, leaving Melanie to deal with the experts who stigmatise mother and son. In the end she turns to the man she's been told by the experts to avoid at all costs: unqualified "play-therapist" Andy O'Connor.

Although this novel is always compelling, Melanie's struggles with her husband feel contrived; he's a two-dimensional character predisposed to every clichéd piece of selfish male behaviour going. Her fight with a variety of medical and educational professionals feels authentic, though, calling into question the basis on which such people expect their clients' unfailing trust.

The Islamist, by Ed Husain (PENGUIN £8.99)

Ed Husain's father was born in British India, his mother in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and he in East London. His early years were happy; his father, a devout Muslim, followed an Indian spiritual leader who, on his regular visits to England, took Ed under his wing and taught him how to recite the Koran at prayer meetings. Husain was a kind of "Muslim choirboy'", and his duties extended to keeping an eye on the news to see what was going on in the Middle East, it being the time of the first Gulf War. The people associated with his "Grandpa", as he called the spiritual leader, wanted to know how the UN planned to respond and what the Arab governments were saying. But their faith remained separate from their politics.

As a teenager, Husain became acquainted with a different kind of Muslim. A new approach to political activism was laid out in Gulam Sarwar's popular school textbook, Islam: Beliefs and Teachings. Estranged from his fellow pupils, Husain started worshipping at the East London Mosque, a place his father would have nothing to do with because of its associations with Jamat-e-Islami, the radical group responsible for promoting the ideas disseminated through Sarwar's book.

Some points appear glossed (there's more to Abul Ala Mawdudi, the founder of Jamat-e-Islami, than Husain suggests), but Husain's very personal account of how he became an Islamic fundamentalist, and then rejected his beliefs, shows Islam to be as vulnerable to hijacking by a bigoted minority as any other faith.

Monks, by Des Dillon (LUATH £7.99)

First published 10 years ago as The Big Q, Dillon's novel has been renamed and reissued. Three Scottish men set off from Coatbridge, outside Glasgow, to stay at a monastery in Monte Cassino, Italy. After some problems with their coach tickets (the local travel agent forgot to note the time using the 24-hour clock and they only get on the bus after one of them points out his travelling companions are on the verge of a psychotic episode); a panicky landing in Rome ("I don't think he's going to make it. We'll all end up in a cake shop on Rome main street"); and mistakenly ending up on the airport's car-park bus instead of the one heading for the train station, they arrive exhausted at the mountain-top hermitage overlooking the monastery. Here they meet Padre Fabian, a fat Franciscan monk with a ball and chain attached to his leg, and try to grow accustomed to early morning mass, salami ("That ham's off"), and the mysteries of faith.

The novel is written in Glasgow dialect with a vast array of fairly primitive typographic variations. It's easy to see why Dillon's theatre work (he's also a playwright) has been praised. But there's a down side to this: imagine some of Billy Connolly's better moments and think how unsatisfactory they'd look on a printed page instead of being spouted by an odd guy with a weird beard. There's a riot of stuff about faith and the nature of the individual, but for all its noise and energy, the story rarely seems to have much depth. In places it is pretty funny - but you could say the same about the Carry On films.

A Sense of the World, by Jason Roberts (POCKET BOOKS £7.99)

At a time when the blind were "routinely housed in asylums", the feats of British explorer James Holman (1786-1857) were extraordinary. Having lost his sight in his twenties (he never wrote about the precise nature of his condition; unlike most great explorers, Holman preferred to remain fairly anonymous), he went on to become one of the most prolific travellers in history - before the advent of the internal combustion engine, perhaps the most widely travelled. He travelled on his own, "in native fashion, in public carriages and peasant carts, on horseback and on foot", and became an authority on matters as diverse as the fauna of the Indian Ocean and the language of Equatorial Guinea. After his death, however, he soon slipped into obscurity. "His sightlessness made genuine insight impossible," wrote a rival whose own expedition had been eclipsed by one of Holman's.

This excellent biography owes much to the wonderful balance the author achieves between detail ("Holman taught himself to navigate with an ordinary walking stick. It was approximately navel height, lathed out of hickory or similarly sturdy wood, with an unadorned knob and a metal ferrule to keep the top from splitting") and evocative description that helps a reader understand what Holman faced: "Imagine yourself walking through a dense wood, in the dead of a moonless night." There can be very few biographical projects that have required the author to identify quite so closely with a subject in order to convey the scale of his achievements.