Paperbacks: The Cheek Perforation Dance<br></br>Total Recall <br></br>The CEO of the Sofa <br></br>Paris Hollywood: writings on film <br></br>Chemistry

The Cheek Perforation Dance, by Sean Thomas (Flamingo, £10.99, 277pp)

Two years ago, Sean Thomas received a Bad Sex Award for a passage in which he compared a young woman's body to a Sony Walkman. Now he has written a novel in which "bad sex" of a more serious nature takes centre-stage. In a roman à clef of the least romantic kind, this true-to-life courtroom drama revisits Old Bailey court number 18. There, in 1987, the author stood trial for the rape of his ex-girlfriend. He was eventually found not guilty, but not before spending time in jail.

In the novel, Thomas's fictional alter ego, nightclub owner Patrick, falls in love with Rebecca, a Jewish princess from Hampstead. Their story progresses along the lines of any ill-matched London romance. He does drugs, she doesn't. She's studying the Crusades, he's living off her parents' money. Then one day the couple stumble upon a mutual taste for violent sex. This strange courtship dance is convincingly drawn, and given that neither character is particularly appealing, questions of blame and guilt become interestingly blurred. Best of all are Thomas's courtroom scenes, which perfectly pinpoint the mix of boredom and terror that surrounds any day in the witness box.

As with all novels that "fictionalise" real emotional histories – Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy springs to mind – it's hard not to feel sympathy for the victim of the one-sided act of literary revenge. Either way you look at it, "Rebecca" has been screwed. Once or twice over? That's up to you to judge. It's a shamefully compelling process.

Total Recall, by Sara Paretsky (Penguin, £6.99, 544pp)

Paretsky's 12th V I Warshawski mystery has one humdinger of a plot. The Chicago-based sleuth is busy at work on a fraud case involving a black family who have been cheated out of their life insurance when V I's friend and mentor, Lotty Hershel, seeks out her help. Being bothered by a man with a Holocaust past, Lotty is nervous that she and the stranger seem to share identical childhood memories of Nazi Europe. That the two stories – insurance fraud and the recovery of assets stolen in the Holocaust – ever mesh is testament to Paretsky's narrative grip. V I's South Side savvy is operating at full throttle.

The CEO of the Sofa, by P J O'Rourke (Picador, £7.99, 265pp)

More waspish swipes at contemporary culture from the American humorist. Motormouthing from the comfort of his Washington home (he's now a daddy and, judging from his wife's frequent appearances in the book, an uxorious husband), he targets the usual suspects: UN ambassadors, Hillary Clinton and Democrats in general ("being rich is not fair"). Most interesting are O'Rourke's pre-September 11 Rudolph Giuliani jibes: "Rudi is a cold, vengeful martinet of a man – exactly the person that we 263 million Americans who don't want to live in New York City want that town to have as its mayor."

Paris Hollywood: writings on film, by Peter Wollen (Verso, £12, 314pp)

Most people who have dipped a toe into the serious study of movies will have felt the snap of Peter Wollen's Signs and Meanings in the Cinema. That early landmark of semiological film theory burnished the mystique of the critic who also co-wrote the original screenplay for Antonioni's eerie The Passenger. Currently the professor of film at UCLA, Wollen returns with this sparkling collection of essays from the past decade. He has a far lighter, more readable touch now, although he still brims with high ideas (from history, psychoanalysis, politics and architecture) as he tracks from Hitchcock, Godard and Hawks to Jarman, Greenaway and the "riff-raff realism" of British spiv movies. Even Hollywood should cherish this well-armed enemy camped at its gates.

Chemistry, by Damien Wilkins (Granta, £10, 302pp)

It takes a little while to adapt to Damien Wilkins's off-kilter New Zealanders: they have a lot to say, much of it funny, some of it plain goofy. The novel opens with a 40-year-old junkie, Jamie Webb, en route to have a kidney stone removed. The operation over, he heads home where we meet the rest of the family: his brother, a doped pharmacist, his sister, a GP with a drink problem, and their mum Ruth, a scary matriarch hooked on herbal remedies. A bathroom cabinet of dysfunction, Wilkins's weirdos jostle for attention, and generally deserve to get it.