Paperbacks: If You Liked School You'll Love WorkOne Good TurnGuerra!, by Jason WebsterThe Devil in Amber, by Mark GatissThe Perfect Summer: Dancing into shadow in 1911

If You Liked School You'll Love Work, by Irvine Welsh (Cape £11.99)

Irvine Welsh's new collection of stories serves up pretty much what you'd expect: tales of damaged people tumbling into difficult situations which they usually go on to make worse. The blurb touts Welsh as one of the nation's "filthiest" writers and, by the last page, you feel you've probably read some of the best and worst prose going.

The story "Rattlesnakes" is definitely among the worst. Three young Americans, two men and a woman, crash their car in the desert. Help eventually comes in the form of a couple of North American-hating Mexicans; unfortunately their arrival coincides with one of the young Americans trying to suck snake poison out of a bite on his friend's penis while the girl watches. There's possibly some glib social commentary going on, but if you put your mind to it, you could say the same thing about anything appearing in Viz.

The frenetic title story is a different, rather more complicated proposition. Mickey Baker, an expat wide boy running a pub on one of the Canary Islands, has the hots for his barmaid. It isn't quite what you'd expect: "I love Cynth's fat." How can he keep things going with her and cope with the other women in his life? His ex-wife in England has put their teenage daughter on the first plane to the Canaries and Persephone, "this farking hairy little Greek gel I was nailing last summer", has sent a text saying she's back on the island. Although Baker's cockney isn't always convincing and the plot - one clapped-out, deluded person banging up against another - is relentlessly sordid, the story exudes a grubby magnetism.

The same is true of the last and best story, "Kingdom of Fife". When he confines himself to Scotland, Welsh seems rather less obsessed with playing to the gallery. The result, as we follow failed jockey Jason King in his quest to find work, a woman and success as a table-football champion, is frequently ugly, but in places oddly intimate. Setting a posh female first-person perspective against Jason's, told in broad Scots dialect, is surprisingly successful. When the strange chemistry of Irvine Welsh's fiction boils up at the right heat, there are still very few writers who can touch him.

One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson (Black Swan £7.99)

Crime writer Martin Canning is so gentle he won't even kill the flies in his house. He prefers to stalk them with a glass, trap them and set them free. It's his surprising intervention during a brutal act of road-rage that sets this murder mystery in motion. He flings his laptop at a baseball-wielding Honda driver and saves the life of the mysterious, badly beaten Paul Bradley. Later, the Honda driver turns up at his house, mistakenly exacting vengeance on his unwanted houseguest, a third-rate comedian called Richard Moat.

Other people witnessing the road-rage incident find their lives changed, too. There's Gloria, the wife of a dodgy property dealer, and ex-private eye Jackson Brodie, a character from Atkinson's Case Histories, who unwittingly becomes a murder suspect.

Tinged with darkness and studded with subtle profundities ("It was strange how something you weren't expecting could, nonetheless, turn out to be no surprise at all"), this book will find many admirers. With all its cleverness and complex plotting, though, it may be hard to find someone who truly loves it.

Guerra!, by Jason Webster (Black Swan £7.99)

Having moved into a farm house in Valencia, Jason Webster, best known for his writing about Spanish music, finds himself connecting with the Spanish Civil War - something his friends have dismissed as "politics, nothing more, just a scrap between some people on the Left and some others on the Right". Wandering in the hills, he's shown the grave of the last Republican soldiers to make a stand against Franco at the end of the war. With the conflict so distant and Franco long dead he wonders why the bodies, at least 70 of them, still lie in an unmarked pit.

This book is in many ways an outstanding account of the war and its causes. The story of Lorca's death is particularly powerful. Although the poet was just one of hundreds of thousands murdered by the Franco regime, his death came to symbolise the horror of the war, and was a major reason why so many British intellectuals and artists went to fight with the Republicans. Some of Webster's personal observations and asides are less successful; unwelcome distractions among such emotionally charged material.

The Devil in Amber, by Mark Gatiss (Pocket Books £7.99)

Lucifer Box is the kind of 1920s secret agent who delights in rushing in where angels fear to tread. In fact, Box's private activities are anything but angelic. When he wakes up in bed next to a man who's been shot dead, the authorities find it easier to believe that his personal shenanigans have simply spiralled horribly out of control than that he's been framed for murder. It doesn't help that certain people appear keen to see Box, approaching his middle years, pensioned off. There's been a change of regime in the service and the likes of agent Percy Flarge, "an athletic Cambridge Blue of little discernible charm", seem to be getting preferential treatment.

After a botched mission to assassinate a New York cocaine dealer, Box is given one last case: to keep an eye on Olympus Mons, the leader of a fast-growing fascist organisation. It soon becomes clear, however, that Mons' ultimate goal might be far more diabolical than mere political ascendancy. In the company of various oddballs, not least the gorgeously named Agnes Daye, Box unwittingly helps unleash the darkest forces of evil.

The Perfect Summer: Dancing into shadow in 1911, by Juliet Nicolson (John Murray £8.990)

During the long, hot summer of 2003 Nicolson read L P Hartley's novel The Go-Between and wondered whether there had ever been a near-perfect summer like the one described in the novel. The summer of 1911 was almost exclusively one of sunny days and extraordinary heat: by mid-August the temperature had hit 100F, but there were signs the weather was about to break and, as it grew less predictable, the peace of the nation was threatened by industrial unrest. Discontent at the gulf between the wealthy and the poor grew more marked. Nicolson's decision to use the weather as the background for this rich social history was a clever one.

The book successfully conjures up the complacency of the upper classes and nouveau riche. All through May, shipyard owners dismissed any suggestion that industrial action could take place - a gross misreading of the strength of feeling that prevailed among the dockers. Society events such as the Savoy Ball are described in minute detail; the book is extraordinarily well researched. Few histories are as informative and entertaining as this one.