Paperbacks: Black Swan Green No Turning Back The Tartar Steppe Tescopoly Apples American Shaolin

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (SCEPTRE £7.99)

Reviewers far better than I struggled in vain to open this Chinese puzzle box of a novel. Minor characters from Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas appear in two significant secondary roles and the Beatles' "Revolution No.9" is played at a key moment, but with its single narrator and straightforwardstory, Mitchell's fourth novel has none of the obvious dazzle or structural ingenuity of his previous three. There are 13 chapters, each accounting for a month in the life of a boy in his 13th year, and the first and last chapters have the same title, so perhaps it's one giant clever palindrome? No. Apparently it really is just the bittersweet, coming-of-age-story that it appears to be. A state-school version of Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club, with an acknowledged debt to Andrew "I Love the 80s" Collins's memoir, Where Did It All Go Right?.

That being the case, the raucous classmates of the sensitive young stammerer Jason Taylor could have been better differentiated; it being set in a small Worcestershire village, Cloud Atlas's Eva van Outreyve de Crommelynck is conspicuously in the wrong novel; and the whole thing could have been shorter. But Mitchell does apply dramatic irony sparingly and effectively, so that Jason's wilful misinterpretation of his parents' bad moods and his naïve Falklands-era jingoism is believable as well as heart-rending. He delineates very precisely the complex, unspoken edicts of playground politics. And, ventriloquising a precocious 13-year-old's voice with often hilarious results, his prose is as tangy and enjoyable as ever.

No Turning Back by Joanne Lees (HODDER £6.99)

Perhaps you are already familiar with Joanne Lees's story: she was the only witness, and for a long time the prime suspect, in one of the more heavily (and distastefully) publicised murder cases of recent years. On the night of 14 July 2001 she and her boyfriend of five years, Peter Falconio, were stopped by a gunman on an empty road. Falconio was killed; Lees escaped into the bush and hid, thereby presumably avoiding being raped, killed or both. Falconio's body was never found but, in December 2005, a jury in the Darwin Supreme Court found John Bradley Murdoch guilty of his murder.

However, prior to Murdoch's arrest (on suspicion of having raped a 12-year-old girl and her mother in the back of his truck), and the discovery that his DNA matched a sample found on Lees's shirt, Lees had been treated, not as the victim of a violent crime, but as a suspected criminal, by both the Northern Territory police force and, worse, the British and Australian media.

Having been vindicated, her own account of events is surprisingly gracious. It does, though, have the same self-possessed, detached and defensive tone that seemed to be what got her into trouble in the first place. Perhaps inevitably, she limits herself to relating the facts as she remembers them, almost as dryly as in the police statements she quotes from, barely speculating on any of the wider issues that her case raised. I don't begrudge her whatever amount of closure or money she may have gained from writing it, but it fails to serve any other purpose.

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (CANONGATE £7.99)

Dino Buzzati's enigmatic, Kafkaesque novel begins with newly commissioned young lieutenant Giovanni Drogo setting out for Fort Bastiani - a remote mountaintop garrison overlooking a vast misty plain beyond which Tartar forces may or may not be amassing. It is his first posting after the drab tedium of the military academy, and "the day he had been looking forward to for years - the beginning of his real life". But his creator's mocking irony is evident from page one, and we know that it will be no such thing. Drogo will remain at Fort Bastiani for the rest of the book, and the remaining 30 years of his life, endlessly preparing for a day that never comes. He will die without having seen action, without having loved or been loved, and without ever, really, having lived.

The Tartar Steppe was written in 1939 (though first published in 1945), when the looming spectre of conflict would doubtless have been even more keenly felt, and when Drogo's hankering "for a hero's death" and his impotence might both have seemed more absurd. But of course his predicament is a universal one, and this is an elegant, bleakly comic and rather unnerving expansion of John Lennon's admonition that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. The older Drogo gets, the quicker time passes in the novel, and he establishes a routine that is easily related by Buzzati, who can then devote more time to the coming and going of the garrison's other soldiers. The result is that Drogo's significance, even within his own novel, diminishes as he ages.

Tescopoly by Andrew Simms (CONSTABLE £7.99)

With profits of about £5,000 per minute, Tesco receives one in every £8 that British shoppers spend. It's hard to gauge how glib its chief executive, Terry Leahy, was being, when he said that that still leaves the other seven to go after. However, at any one time, 100 individual local communities in which a new store has been proposed are involved in a campaign against Tesco, coordinated with the help of the Tescopoly website that Andrew Simms's think-tank co-founded.

With reference to numerous case studies and examples, Simms builds a strong case against the company: that it uses anti-competitive practices to put independent retailers out of business, dissolving the social glue that binds communities, and driving the homogenisation of our diets, the landscape and our daily lives; that its so-called low prices come at a cost, namely the exploitation of workers all along the supply chain, and harm to the environment. And what's more, Simms's own experience of shopping at Tesco isn't a happy one. "A quietly corrosive nothingness, imported through a culture of unquestioning consumerism, is beginning to hollow me out from within." But he doesn't blame the company for being good at what it does. He blames the free market economy for failing to check its excesses and argues that we need a fundamental rethinking of the legal standing of corporations. Perhaps it's a little self-righteous at times, but it's also a passionate, powerful polemic, and every little helps.

Apples by Richard Milward (FABER £9.99)

Adam and Eve, the two 15-year-old protagonists of Richard Milward's first novel, live in a deprived part of Middlesbrough that's far from Eden. Eve probably had the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil mashed up and mixed in with her baby food. Adam, meanwhile, is still comparatively innocent - but he sure is tempted. Eve shags boys, takes pills and sniffs poppers as casually as her other friends might shoplift or spray their tag on a wall, and has done since she was 13; Adam is still a horny virgin and must make do with his dad's copy of Razzle and his imagination. She likes house music and going crazy on the dancefloor; he stays in his room listening to the Beatles while his OCD worsens. She's popular at school, he's not. Her dad's left home and her mum's got cancer; his dad severely beats him and his mum doesn't seem to notice.

You think they'd probably be good for each other in some ways. They're Apples' only sympathetic characters so you root for them to get together, and Milward's pacing of the will-they-won't-they romance structure is the best thing about an otherwise cynical and dispiriting read. Elsewhere, unconscious girls get raped at parties and teens on drugs glass each other at the school disco. An episode of Skins without the TV gloss, or a Vicky Pollard monologue without the laughter track, it succeeds in its intention to shock, but not in its efforts to flesh out that stereotype of the wayward teen that is routinely demonised.

American Shaolin by Matthew Polly (ABACUS £10.99)

Like many of his generation, Matthew Polly was captivated by the 1970s David Carradine TV show Kung Fu, which he watched as a nine-year-old boy in small town Kansas. He cites it as the inspiration for his decision to study Chinese philosophy and Mandarin at Princeton. For this intellectually adventurous but physically unprepossessing westerner, the combination of Ch'an (later Zen) Buddhism and kung fu, practised at the Shaolin temple in China since the 5th century, proved irresistible. Upon learning from his Chinese professor that Shaolin isn't merely something belonging to legend but a real, functioning monastery and martial arts school, he spies the opportunity to embark on a quest.

It being 1992, only three years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, before China was recognised as an emerging superpower and its international image was still that of an impoverished, undeveloped country with a repressive Communist regime, it was a bolder quest than it might seem today.

Had he written this fish-out-of-water travelogue nearer the time, then, its impact would have been greater. But his recall is impressive, and he's able to use the mismatch between reality and the China and Shaolin of his imagination, to good comic effect. Trading on its cultural past in order to make it a commercially viable tourist attraction, the temple is the very model of what Deng Xiaoping, the then Communist Party leader, called "socialism with Chinese characteristics".