Paperbacks: Stuart: a life backwards The Icarus Girl The Farm Sugarmilk Falls Electric Universe Love and Other Near Death Experiences

Stuart: a life backwards by Alexander Masters (HARPER PERENNIAL £7.99)

A glue-sniffing, self-destructive teenage delinquent who grew up to be a heroin-addict, recidivist criminal and knife-wielding nutter, Stuart Shorter wasn't someone you'd think you'd want to get to know. Yet this biography by the homelessness charity worker who befriended him is original, eye-opening, funny, profoundly moving and utterly unputdownable. Stuart's idea that his life should be told backwards turns out to have been inspired. The first 50-odd pages of a biography are often a chore, and Stuart doesn't remember his childhood anyway. This way round, we're introduced to him when his life is already a car-wreck you can't help but stare at, and then feel compelled to work back and discover which wrong turnings he took. It also ensures you never suffer the illusion that there'll be a happy ending, though I feel I should warn you it gets pretty distressing near the end.

Stuart was unpredictable and maddening, but he was also clever, indomitable, funny, likeable and well worth getting to know. The friendship which developed between author and subject while they collaborated is at the heart of the book and, in transcribing their discussions and interminable bickering, Masters displays a superb ear for idiomatic dialogue. Stuart forever rails against the system, and Masters highlights some injustices himself. But he's learnt the gallows humour and expediency of the frontline care-worker. For Stuart and others like him, he admits that "it isn't a bedsit and employment they need; it is a new brain."

The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi (BLOOMSBURY £7.99)

The Icarus Girl is an accomplished, seductive tale of the uncanny which explores the traumas of childhood and mixed race identity. Jessamy is an imaginative and precocious eight-year-old girl living in Home Counties suburbia. She doesn't have any friends, and likes to hide in the airing cupboard, reading Hamlet or writing haiku. At times she daydreams herself into near catatonic states, at others she's prone to fits of screaming. The real trouble starts after she's taken to her Nigerian mother's home town for the holidays. There, she confronts the fact of her otherness, discovers her previously dormant Yoruban heritage, and makes her first ever best friend, Tilly Tilly. This would be good, except that Tilly Tilly is either a projection of Jess's fractured psyche made manifest, a doppelgänger, or the ghost of a girl she's forgotten she ever knew. Either way, Tilly Tilly's high-spirited nature spills over into recklessness, and when the pair are reunited in England their behaviour becomes increasingly dangerous.

Helen Oyeyemi describes the world through a child's eyes brilliantly. Reviewers have tended to attribute this to the fact that she was a teenager herself when she wrote it, and didn't quite give her writing due credit. Her prose is disciplined and lucid, her imagery painted with bold primary colours and delicate brushstrokes. Jess is a secretive child because " thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in dark places, like butterflies in cocoons". And from this book Jess's thoughts do, indeed, emerge fully formed, rare, delicate and lovely.

The Farm by Richard Benson (PENGUIN £8.99)

The story of the changed state of British agriculture, adroitly told through the experiences of the last two generations of a typical Yorkshire farming family, would seem a surprising subject for the first book by former editor of The Face, Richard Benson, were that Yorkshire farming family not his own. As the teenage son of a farmer, who was also the son of a farmer and so on back through generations, Benson did his best to help out on the farm. It was soon apparent that he was a liability though, who "couldn't even shoo a pig along without falling over". His dad's encouragement only made him feel worse. Luckily, his brother Guy turned out to be a farming prodigy, and Benson was able to escape into his schoolbooks and, later, to university and to London.

When he returns, it's to help with the unhappy job of liquidating the business. In the space of a generation, his family's way of life has become untenable. The supermarkets' buying power and advances in agricultural science have rendered small-holdings obsolete. Their farm is converted into rustic-style housing, their equipment ends up as curios in an antique dealers. They can't even give their livestock away.

With his dual insider's and outsider's viewpoints, Benson is able to weave social history with a beautifully observed and intimate domestic drama. The nostalgia of his childhood memoir sharply contrasts with the dour humour and pragmatism of the Yorkshiremen he left behind, and the result is funny and moving.

Sugarmilk Falls by Lona Van Mil (PICADOR £7.99)

An unnamed stranger has arrived in Sugarmilk Falls, asking questions about the events of 20 years ago - those disappearances that made the newspapers. Sugarmilk Falls is a conservative, insular, often snowbound, small town nestled amid the awe-inspiring wilderness of northern Ontario. Built upon the foundations of lumber, fur and maple syrup, it's an apparently sleepy and harmonious community with a one man-strong police force and a communal, party-line telephone exchange buzzing with local gossip. Its location and small-town mentality put one in mind of Twin Peaks.

Lona Van Mil's first novel is an atmospheric, neatly constructed but very slow-burning mystery story which for a long time only coyly hints at crimes which have been committed. The townsfolk have gathered for one night to answer the stranger's questions, and they take turns contributing to a patchwork narrative that draws attention to its own unreliability. Some of the narrators think the story begins with the feud between the grade school teacher and the local Ojibwa family, for others it began earlier, in postwar Paris. For some, murderous passions are the heart of the matter, for others it's greed and the unsettled business of land rights.

It's a well-worn device, this multi-angled approach, and in Van Mil's case it feels a little artificial. All her characters speak in the same, measured literary voice, so that the first part of her book is merely confusing, rather than intriguing. But the eventual strong narrative pull and the depth of focus with which she examines this unusual town make it well worth sticking with.

Electric Universe by David Bodanis (ABACUS £7.99)

Electricity is such a ubiquitous force in our lives, so readily available at the flick of a switch, that we take it for granted. Bodanis's very readable book makes us appreciate it as we should. In the beginning, electricity was merely the force that shaped and held together the universe. Billions of years later, it also began to be used to power advanced supercomputers. And then millions of years after that, the most advanced of these supercomputers - human minds - noticed signs of this omnipresent force, and, even before they understood what it was, discovered ingenious ways to harness it. This is the point (the Victorian era) at which Bodanis picks up the story.

Taking a chronological, biographical approach, he describes the cumulative discoveries made by Alexander Bell, Edison, Faraday, Heinrich Hertz, Robert Watson Watt, Alan Turing and others; the technologies which their discoveries enabled; and something of their characters, motivations, and the times in which they lived and worked. Bell, for example, was working on a way to woo his deaf sweetheart when he invented the telephone, and Watt was inspired to invent radar so he could earn a new military posting and escape Slough.

It's a logical and elegant way to introduce a very complicated subject, and the added human interest keeps things moving. It doesn't feel like too technical a book, and indeed it's possible that you could reach the end and then still want to ask, "so how does electricity work, exactly?" But you'll find that somewhere along the way you have picked up a more profound appreciation of man's ingenuity, and nature's marvel.

Love and Other Near Death Experiences by Mil Millington (WEIDENFELD £10)

A series of banal, everyday decisions relating to hotdogs and towels causes Rob to be late for an appointment, but he does arrive in time to see a tanker plough into the building he would otherwise have been in, killing everyone inside. Newly aware of the potentially life or death consequences that even the most insignificant seeming decision can lead to, he sometimes now finds himself paralysed by indecision, standing stock still in front of the sink or at a fast-food counter for a full half hour, unable to decide whether or not to go large, or whether to wash the knife or the fork first. And as if there weren't already enough meaningless choices to be made each day, Rob's fiancée wants him to be more involved in planning the detail of their wedding day.

It's a promising set up for a serious novel about fate, the implications of chaos theory and the effect upon the human psyche of the overly complex modern world. But this isn't that novel. Mil Millington's talent is for snappy dialogue, sarcasm and punning prose. In order to indulge it he gives Rob some one-dimensional comedy sidekicks - a dumb, American former marine and an outrageously caustic, manic-depressive English teacher - and sets him off on a quest to investigate his condition.

In a clever conceit adapted from the teen horror movie Final Destination, the plot, such as it is, eventually coalesces around a lunatic fringe of armed Christian fundamentalists. But Millington too often interrupts it to deliver his self-contained little observational comedy routines, and his novel starts to become repetitive and a little tiresome.