Paperbacks: Gold The Cloudspotter's Guide The Lotus Eaters Send in the Idiots Captain Starlight's Apprentice Sir Alf

Gold by Dan Rhodes (CANONGATE £9.99)

For eight winters in a row, Miyuki has holidayed on her own in the same Welsh coastal village. Its charms are not immediately apparent, amounting to a couple of local pubs and a rock on the beach which, in a certain light, looks like it's made of gold. During the days, she feasts on Pot Noodles and walks the coastal paths; the evenings she spends in the Anchor, supping pints of Brains while the idle banter of the pub's few regulars ebbs and flows around her. The landlord is a man of few words but has found two, "holy" and "mackerel", that will suit most occasions, while Tall Mr Hughes talks at length but with no purpose - mainly about alligators - and Septic Barry talks almost exclusively about human waste management.

What Miyuki is doing here, and why she keeps returning, will become apparent in good time. We'll also come to know all of the pub regulars' idiosyncrasies, and warm to most of them. But there really isn't much more than that to this digressive and yet repetitive novel, which is crafted in prose so flat that it might have been written by a child. So I really don't understand how Rhodes has marshalled such material into something that is both hilarious and acutely affecting, perhaps even profound. His is a special and distinctive talent. As in the nearly as brilliant Timoleon Vieta Come Home, he takes it one page too far, so that, finally, Gold is not just touching but unnecessarily upsetting. But for that, I could have recommended it unreservedly. As it is, I merely recommend you tear out and throw away the last page before you begin.

The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney (SCEPTRE £7.99)

As well as having co-founded The Idler, the publication dedicated to leisurely pursuits, Gavin Pretor-Pinney set up the Cloud Appreciation Society, a web-based meeting-place for people who enjoy looking at clouds that apparently has an international, thousands-strong membership. Its manifesto states that we should fight "blue-sky thinking"; that clouds are "nature's poetry"; and that their contemplation benefits the soul.

No doubt the project was half-conceived as a joke but, while Pretor-Pinney manages to keep the tone airy, this is a nevertheless erudite and earnest little book, aimed at the amateur enthusiast. It introduces each genus of cloud in order, according to its place in the meteorologist's classification table, and then goes cloudspotting in the fields of art, mythology, literature, philosophy and poetry.

Constable, "perhaps Britain's best cloud painter", said that "we see nothing truly till we understand it", so Pretor-Pinney also includes a decent introduction to elementary meteorology. So we see that, as ever, nature's reality often turns out to be more remarkable than the most inventive human mythologies. For example, Sanskrit creation myths describe how elephants were originally white, could fly, change their shape at will, and bring rain, which is why the animals were worshipped with a view to bringing rain, and the classical Hindi word for elephant and cloud is the same. In fact, the cumulative mass of the water droplets in an average Cumulus cloud (that's the archetypal, fluffy, white one) is equivalent to that of 80 elephants.

The Lotus Eaters by Marianne Macdonald (HEINEMANN £11.99)

Like the author, the narrator of Marianne Macdonald's first novel is a freelance journalist who specialises in interviewing celebrities. But the novel isn't really about her, it's about Patty Belle, a sexy, impulsive, endearingly childlike model whom Lottie meets in LA during a trip to interview Alanis Morissette. The blurb compares her to Holly Golightly, Sally Bowles and Lorelei Lee, and she certainly does have something of a composite and changeable character. When she moves to London she stays with Lottie, who introduces her to her small clique of old university friends - another journalist and his wife, a playwright and his wife. Patty is ill equipped to keep up with their talk of the dotcom boom or the latest Hanif Kureishi play, but the men are charmed by her vulgar non sequiturs and her frank sensuality, even if the men's wives remain wary.

And that, really, is it: a lot of middle-class dinner party chatter enlivened only by a few rude words and some all too predictable bed-hopping. Lottie, the narrator, is so sketchy a character that it's impossible to care what happens to her, let alone her friends. And it's a wonder she ever made it as a journalist: her judgement of character is repeatedly wide of the mark and she's exceedingly slow to read social situations. If I thought this was intended as a satire of celebrity journalism I might be impressed, but I don't - I think it is Macdonald's way of trying to build tension into an unoriginal and unexciting story that has none. Much like her characters, this isn't an awful book, it just has nothing interesting to say.

Send in the Idiots by Kamran Nazeer (BLOOMSBURY £7.99)

Kamran Nazeer is a successful, confident-seeming man, with a law degree and a PhD in philosophy, who works as a journalist and as a policy advisor in Whitehall. Evidently he is at the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum. He's lucky that his condition was correctly diagnosed when he was a child, at a time, in the early 1980s, when in an estimated 75 per cent of cases autism was undiagnosed, and even less was known about the condition than is understood now. He was also lucky to have been sent to the one, small school in New York specially designed for children like him. How did the lives of his equally lucky classmates at that time turn out, Nazeer wonders, and sets off to find out.

Well, there's André, who carves wooden puppets that he uses to ventriloquise his thoughts. He's a likeable man - but just don't interrupt when his puppets are talking or you're liable to find yourself locked in the bathroom. André is now a computer programmer working in the field of artificial intelligence. Then there's Randall, a cycle courier who knows the streets of New York inside out, but is having trouble in his first adult relationship.

Belying the myth that autistics can't fathom the interior lives of others, Nazeer has written a set of very humane profiles, though the analytical route he takes toward understanding his old classmates is often peculiarly circuitous. While it will do much to further awareness of autism, the book's thoughtful scrutiny of how we interact with others, autistic or not, is just as useful.

Captain Starlight's Apprentice by Kathryn Heyman (HEADLINE £7.99)

Kathryn Heyman's fourth novel separately tells the stories of Jess and Rose, two women from different generations who've seemingly led very different lives. We'll find out what connects them at the end, but for now we just notice that both have been uprooted and are struggling to make sense of their places in a world that doesn't treat them fairly. In rural Australia somewhere near the beginning of the last century, 12-year-old Jess, a natural-born horse rider, was sold to Ariel's Great Circus Show to cover her father's debts. Life on the road suits her just fine and, at 17, she marries Ariel, the Chinese ringmaster. Soon after she'll begin working as a stuntrider. Prejudice, betrayal and a personal tragedy will later force her to become an outlaw.

Rose, meanwhile, was among the wave of English emigrants encouraged in the 1950s to begin a new life in Australia. Soon after, she finds herself in a psychiatric hospital suffering with what would today be diagnosed as post-natal depression. Memories of her idyllic life in England mingle with fantasies of the Doris Day life she should be leading, and she wonders where it all went wrong.

Captain Starlight's Apprentice alternates, then, between dreamy, elliptical melancholy and a feisty frontier adventure. In both cases, Heyman's writing is controlled and engaging, but it's Jess's unruly narration that grips you. Only when their stories converge does the book finally come to feel like more than the sum of its parts.

Sir Alf By Leo McKinstry (HARPER SPORT £8.99)

The son of a poor agricultural worker, Alf Ramsey was born in 1920 in what was at the time the rural village of Dagenham, Essex. He left school at 14 and worked as a delivery boy until he was enlisted for service in 1940. Spotted while playing football in 1943, he was quickly signed by the Saints and went on to enjoy a distinguished playing career there and at Spurs, captaining his country three times. In 1955, he began managing Ipswich Town, who were at the bottom of the then Third Division. Seven seasons later, in a feat unrivalled in the history of English football management, they were champions of the then First Division. In 1966, he led England team all the way to Wembley and watched from the sidelines as they won the World Cup. He was knighted the following year. Mistakes that he made off the pitch in Mexico cost England the World Cup in 1970, and they failed to qualify in 1974. Ramsay was then sacked by the FA, and lived off a meagre pension until he died in 1999, survived by his wife of 48 years.

The difference between this potted biography of Ramsay and McKinstry's thorough, personally researched, 500-page one, is only in the detail - there really wasn't anything else in the man's life but football. Those who played for him have only kind words to say about him; the book's contrast comes from the quotes from journalists and officials he'd been curt with. McKinstry argues that it was only shyness that caused him to seem arrogant in public, and that the inestimably astute man that the players recall is the one that we should remember.