Paperbacks: No Country for Old MenWhy White Kids Love Hip HopPraying MantisPlaying PresidentMammalsThe Story of Childhood

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (PICADOR £7.99)

Set amid the desert plains and small towns of 1980s Texas and starring Ed Tom Bell - decorated war hero, homespun philosopher and, like his grand-father before him, upstanding Texan sheriff - McCarthy's newest novel is another elegy for the good ol' American west, and a eulogy to its rugged landscape and those codes of masculinity delineated by John Wayne. The good news is that this time, it's also a taut thriller, nearer to Elmore Leonard than Ernest Hemingway.

Out hunting in the desert, welder and Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss comes across a bunch of shot up SUVs and dead Mexicans, a trunk full of heroin and a satchel stuffed with cash. He takes the money and runs; Sheriff Bell and a cold-blooded killer spend the rest of the novel tracking him. But just because the plot is well-worn and simple, don't expect to know what will happen. Genre conventions don't apply and, just because you like a man, or think he's good, it doesn't mean that in this newly lawless America he won't get suddenly shot in the head.

The action sequences are breathless and bloody, but it's when these men are tested that they get to assess what it means to be a man and how they shape up, so they can intermittently philosophise. The simple lyric cadence of McCarthy's dialogue gives the impression that the profundity is inadvertent, and he's pared his prose to the bone, doing away with any word or punctuation mark that isn't strictly necessary, and a fair few that actually were. The result, then: a literary novel for those who don't usually have time for them.

Why White Kids Love Hip Hop, by Bakari Kitwana (PERSEUS £8.99)

It's axiomatic that hip hop predominantly appeals to white middle-class youth and, having got caught up in the breakdancing craze which swept through my 'hood - a pleasant village in Kent - as a boy in the early 1980s, I can attest that it's probably true. As soon as it moved out of the Bronx, hip hop's cross-cultural appeal provoked two fears. The first rap album to go platinum was the debut by the (middle-class, white, Jewish) Beastie Boys, causing many within the culture to speculate that, like rock 'n' roll before it, hip hop was being exploited and appropriated by whites. The anxiety returned in the wake of Eminem's success, most visibly in the pages of The Source, the influential hip hop magazine that Kitwana used to edit. The concomitant anxiety, felt outside the culture, is that hip hop is corrupting white youth, making them as susceptible to drugs, violence and incarceration as America's young black males.

Kitwana's appealing thesis is that both these fears are symptomatic of an outmoded and irrelevant form of race politics which fails to consider the commonalities experienced by young people of every colour, and the coalition they're forming around hip hop. He argues for hip hop as a positive, politicising force, "helping usher in a new racial politics" that is more nuanced - literally, less black and white - with "the potential to parallel if not surpass yesterday's civil rights successes." Unfortunately it's hard to assess quite how naïve he's being as his book has virtually no textual analysis, very few actual young voices, and remains abstract and dully theoretical.

Praying Mantis, by André Brink (VINTAGE £7.99)

'This is strong magic," says Cupido Cockroach to his mother. "There is life in this thing they call writing and it can run further and faster than you ever did." A young Khoikhoi slave boy on an 18th-century Dutch farm in the southern cape of Africa, he's keenly aware of the power of the words written in his Baas's bible. Later, he will be the first Khoi ordained as a Christian preacher, but for now there is magic and stories enough in Cupido's life.

He wasn't born in the usual way, but "hatched from the stories his mother told". One of these had it that an eagle dropped him in her lap, another that a phantom stranger delivered him in a dream. Cupido is friends with Heitsi-Eibib, the hunter-god who sometimes appears as a praying mantis. With Heitsi's help, Cupido can casually pluck a star from the sky and he becomes a legendary hunter and singer of songs. When he's older he becomes a legendary saturnalian, too, fornicating with women, animals and mermaids. In bed with his wife he creates showers of firefly sparks.

André Brink's prose runs far and fast too, and in the marriage of folklore, magical realism and verifiable colonial history he makes his own firefly sparks. Late on, the narrative is given over to the measured, ponderous voice of the English Rev James Read. Brink's point about colonial suppression of indigenous culture, and what a loss it would've been if African folklore had entirely vanished, is well made. It's just a small shame he makes the reader feel some of that loss.

Playing President, by Robert Scheer (AKASHIC £10.99)

Although Scheer's book does include facsimiles of all the personal correspondence he's had with the White House (including faint praise he received from Nixon and Carter and the downright effusive praise he received in handwritten notes from Nancy Reagan and Bill Clinton) he is in the main very modest about his singular achievement as a political journalist - securing print interviews with the American presidents from Nixon to Bush Snr in an age of increasingly televisual campaigning. He also remains objective in his assessments of their character and policy.

The subjects granted Scheer these interviews before they moved into the White House and, twice, remarks they made to him overtook the national discourse during their campaigns. Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter, who deliberately invoked "family values" to appeal to "normal Americans", famously let slip to Scheer in Playboy that he'd had lust in his heart for women other than his wife. And even the Republican party was alarmed, along with the rest of America, by Bush Snr's irresponsible notion that "you can have a winner" in a nuclear war. Even Reagan hadn't appeared that divorced from reality.

Such moments were the reward for his expert interviewing technique. Scheer is polite but probing, insistent but non-combative, and develops a rapport that gets him involved in the kind of genuine, spontaneous debate about policy and abstract ideals which is lacking in today's soundbite-saturated political discourse. Even when they seem wrong-headed, they still all emerge as hard-working and principled men. Bush Jr's absence from the line-up is conspicuous and commented on at length.

Mammals, by Pierre Mérot trs Frank Wynne (CANONGATE £9.99)

Imagine Bukowski's episodic boozy escapades and barroom philosophy rewritten by a depressed, middle-aged, bourgeois Parisian, and you're close to knowing what to expect from Mérot's scabrous first novel. Forty years old and living in a 30-metre-square studio flat, childless and divorced, well educated but rarely employed, "Uncle" is his maligned family's "fuck-up". But every family needs one, he consoles himself, in order to reinforce its legitimacy, so it seems he's resigned to being the best fuck-up he can be. It's cruel that this means he can't even take comfort in the fact that there's always someone worse off than him.

He fully expects that some day soon he'll fall asleep in a bar, with a drink in his hand and never wake up. It's typically Parisian that when it happens, he expects the coroner to report he died, not of alcoholism, but from an excessive want of love. "Life ends pretty much as a party ends: single people clinging to other single people they had barely noticed before." At any one time he'll allow two or three women to try and save him from himself. They usually admit defeat after a few weeks, and he's at least decent enough to put off the ones who don't. While the bars are closed he busies himself with visits to a succession of therapists each as ineffectual as the last, and sometimes finding temporary work.

And that's pretty much the novel's extent. Such essays on contemporary malaise and ennui are commonplace, but Mammals' charm is that Uncle's ceaseless mordant irony is genuinely funny, and that Mérot's sleek prose slips past you as easily as the second half of a bottle of decent red.

The Story of Childhood, by Libby Brooks (BLOOMSBURY £8.99)

When we put away childish things and begin to see through a glass darkly, one of the things we have difficulty viewing clearly is childhood. And "the contemporary adult vision of childhood has become so distorted as to render it opaque, and this opacity is seriously affecting how children grow up today," says Brooks. The physical and mental wellbeing of our children is under constant threat - from paedophiles, the media, traffic, technology and so on. Other people's children, meanwhile, that antisocial lot in the hoodies, threaten us adults. In both cases, we're projecting our own neuroses, of course, and the effects are damaging. In the space of a generation, the space which a typical British eight-year-old can inhabit without adult supervision has reduced to one ninth its former size. It's as if our children are being bred in captivity and, like zoo animals lacking the survival skills necessary to live in the wild, with reduced opportunity to cause mischief, get into trouble or make mistakes, children won't properly develop the skills necessary for adulthood.

Brooks proposes a simple, potentially radical solution: we should listen more often and more carefully to children. To this end, she has spent quality time with nine of them - aged four to 16 and covering all the socioeconomic bases - and offers these dispatches from their worlds. It's an essentially journalistic project, with lots of comment and some sometimes self-righteous editorialising. But the success of it lies with the fact that Brooks has a novelist's eye for the revealing remark or gesture, and succinctly opens up their world to us. The results are frequently poignant but, crucially, not at all sentimental.