Paperbacks: Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen family newspaper Sunstroke and Other Stories M: MI5's first spymaster Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast The Lady and the Little Fox Fur Stevie Wonder: Rhythms of wonder

Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen family newspaper by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell with Thoby Stephen (HESPERUS £9.99)

Hyde Park Gate News collects the extant issues of an in-house family journal that Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), aided by her sister and brother, produced between the ages of nine and 13. It records, in precocious faux-journalese, the comings and goings in their busy, middle-class Victorian home, 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, as well as featuring regular correspondence and advice columns, satirical articles and a serialised story, notices, poems, sketches, cartoons and jokes.

It's of variable quality. The opening lines of the poem "The Death of the Young Rat", for example - "In a barn there once lived a silly young rat / Who once in his hole was viewed by a rat" - don't really foretell the emergence of one of the 20th century's great literary talents. But I think we can make allowances, and actually, for the most part, the mimicry and satire is impressively sophisticated, funny and adult. The "Article on Cheekiness" is a pitch-perfect rendering of typically paternalistic Victorian advice to mothers on how to discipline their children. We can also allow that many of the apparently throwaway non-sequiturs were intentional. The standalone announcement, for example, that: "Mr Gerald Duckworth arrived on Saturday evening at Woodside House while cricket was going on, on a very small scale."

It's a compendium of amusing tidbits and a useful source for any social historians interested in the minutiae of Victorian household life. But for Woolf's fans, it's an extremely rich, revealing and moving piece of juvenilia.

Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley (CAPE £11.99)

The characters in Tessa Hadley's simple, wry stories are generally women whose lives lack passion - bookish academics, gawky adolescents, older divorcees or busy mothers caught up in domestic routine. The stories are structured around those moments when passion surfaces; moments which are all the more intense for apparently being so rare. In the title story, a woman with young children kisses a man who isn't her husband, and it "makes her feel as if there were a glorious tide of secret possibility flowing around the world, enough for everyone". Just knowing that it's there is enough.

In "A Mother's Son", Christine is making notes for a lecture on women novelists when she's reminded of the news that the father of her son, whom she hardly ever thinks about these days, is about to be remarried. Then her son visits and confesses that he's having an affair, and Christine thinks to herself how happy she is to love her son, and how much better her life is without the complications of romantic love. But we don't entirely believe her.

In "A Card Trick", a shy 18-year-old shares a small, innocent but erotically charged moment with a boy that she's fantasised about. In bed later that night, she discovers a warm sensation in the area where her heart is. She "thought that it was probably happiness, a small preparatory portion of the great ecstasies life must have in store for her". It's seems almost cruel of Hadley to tell us that this girl later becomes just another university lecturer on literature, only ever experiencing extremes of emotion by proxy.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert (FABER £8.99)

Beliefs in God or gods, the paranormal, mystic healing and other phenomena for which there aren't yet any rational explanations are widespread, and always have been. But even those among us who pride ourselves on our reason and rationalism still jump to conclusions; see what we expect or want to see; impose patterns on chaos and look for meanings where there aren't necessarily any. That's just how our minds are wired to work. We construct a cognitive model of how the world works that's designed to be useful rather than strictly accurate. And as it turns out, the nature of the universe is entirely counterintuitive.

When something happens, we instinctively ask ourselves why, and to what purpose? Lewis Wolpert - wondering why, and to what purpose - decides that it's because it was an adaptive, evolutionarily useful behaviour, back when we were still on the savannah. Other animals tend only to be able to observe causes and effects, whereas we can imagine and predict them. It explains why we invented tools and they didn't, why we flourished and, later on, invented science.

The upshot (in noted contrast to Richard Dawkins's recent bestseller The God Delusion) is that we should accept and even celebrate our need to believe. There's a caveat - that science is undoubtedly the only route to an understanding of how life, the universe and everything actually works. But science has nothing to say about ethics or morals, and thus isn't the only prism through which we need to view the world.

M: MI5's first spymaster by Andrew Cook (TEMPUS £9.99)

William Melville was born in famine-struck rural Ireland in 1850. When he was older he used to take the family horse and cart to the station for supplies, until one day, he simply never returned. His life story resumes, an indeterminate number of years later, when it's recorded that he joined London's Metropolitan police force in 1872. It contains several such lacunas. By 1903, Melville was one of the country's top detectives, having foiled a plot to assassinate Queen Victoria, helped found the Special Irish Branch (later just the Special Branch), and been celebrated alongside his good friend and advisor, Harry Houdini. So there was widespread surprise when he announced his retirement and disappeared from public view. Only much later was it revealed that, instead of retiring, he'd actually transferred to the War Office to coordinate the recruitment and running of foreign agents, a role that was formalised in 1909 with the establishment of the Secret Service, when he became the first head of MI5.

Using recently declassified documents and others that are apparently still classified, Andrew Cook has done well to write such a coherent biography of such a discreet and evasive subject, a man who used many aliases, routinely destroyed the records of his work, and whose very existence was officially denied until 1997. OK, so a less diligent writer could have fashioned a more thrilling and action-packed page-turner of a book out of such material; but Cook's is carefully told, with a good eye for period detail.

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette Leduc trs Derek Coltman (PETER OWEN MODERN CLASSICS £8.95)

Violette Leduc was known, and her writing was admired, by Camus, Beauvoir, Sartre, Cocteau and Genet, so you'd expect her to have written fierce books about society, morality and sexuality. So she did, most notably her bestselling autobiography, La Bâtarde. But this novella from 1965 is an impressionistic oddity, about a poor, lonely, very hungry, unnamed old woman aimlessly walking the streets of Paris. There's an implied critique of society, which rushes around in proximity to the woman without ever stopping to notice how desperate she is - but it is only implied. We are entirely caught up in the woman's interior life, an existence that she compulsively counts out in coffee beans, which are pretty much all she owns until the day she finds a discarded, mangy old fox fur and makes friends with it.

She may be senile or just delirious with hunger; her sense impressions and memories are jumbled. As she crosses a road, the car exhausts give off a scent of mimosa that transports her back to a country convalescence 40 years earlier. In the next sentence, back in the present tense, "the mimosa was falling like snow." The disjunction between her reality and ours can be heartbreaking. In an empty bus-station waiting room she finds some orange peel and a blackened match, and thinks, "they must be kind people... since they left her these things to remember them by." The narrow focus and the compactness of Leduc's prose mean that, line for line, this book is as richly humane as anything else you're likely to read.

Stevie Wonder: Rhythms of wonder by Sharon Davis (ROBSON £8.99)

Although he's been sharing his music with us for more than four decades, Stevie Wonder is apparently quite a private man. He's never written his autobiography and there's only a clutch of other books about his life. The music writer Sharon Davis was formerly a press officer in Motown's London offices and met Stevie "on several occasions", but still, all she can manage is this uneven and pretty lifeless assemblage of old press cuttings and other people's recollections, which offers little or no sense of the man. It's padded with an exhaustive but dry retelling of which record Wonder released when, what picture was on the cover, which number it entered both the US and the UK charts at, and which numbers it peaked at. But that only poorly conveys the extent of Wonder's cultural significance.

The book's most lively parts are at the beginning, when Stevie (born Stevland Judkins) is still an irrepressible kid, hanging around the Motown studios from the age of 11 while Berry Gordy tries to figure out how to market his talent; instantly mastering any instrument he could lay his hands on, playing practical jokes with Marvin Gaye and keeping the tour bus awake all night with his incessant harmonica playing. After that, through the recording of his great albums of the Seventies and into the politically active but artistically more fallow later years, all you get is soundbites and superficial insight. You're better off just listening to the records. As it says in Braille on the cover of Talking Book: "Here is my music. It is all I have to tell you how I feel."