Paperbacks: The Claude GlassHow Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change a Planet?Best of Young American NovelistsWhere There's a Will There's a WayIn Praise of NavigationLondonistan

The Claude Glass, by Tom Bullough (SORT OF BOOKS £6.99)

Seven-year-old Robin lives on a Welsh hill farm. His parents, Tara and Adam, a couple of ex-hippies, work hard to keep the farm going but their relationship suffers in the process. Tara used to write poetry and have glamorous adventures like riding across India in the back of a truck with a group of musicians; now she ends up spending the day helping Adam drag a tractor out of a bog. Adam works crushingly long hours and grows increasingly impatient with dreamers like Robin's new schoolteacher, Huw. Tara sees qualities in Huw that Adam appears to be losing.

Not far from Robin's home is another, almost derelict farmhouse, where the psychotic farmer and his over-medicated wife have taken to living in a couple of filthy rooms. Their horribly neglected son, Andrew, spends his time with the farm dogs, roaming forgotten rooms and hiding in secret places where only animals go. In a grand room with a chandelier he finds a strange black mirror: an artist's Claude Glass, a device late 18th-century painters used to help them frame and simplify landscapes. Almost feral and barely able to speak, Andrew has no regular human companion until he meets Robin and the two boys become friends. Of course it's never the kind of friendship liable to prosper.

This often unnerving tale of romanticism suffocating beneath the weight of flinty pragmatism shows Bullough to be a very gifted writer indeed. In Andrew, he's created atruly memorable fictional character, but a word of warning: books rarely end as heartbreakingly as this one.

How Many Lightbulbs Does it Take to Change a Planet?, by Tony Juniper (QUERCUS £12)

In 1517 Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church, each challenging the religious orthodoxy of his time. Although he was branded a heretic, his ideas spread rapidly across Europe. Although Juniper's decision to parallel Luther by publishing 95 potential solutions to the Earth's environmental problems has a down side - environmentalists are frequently caricatured as pious and idealistic, so religious parallels might be better avoided - some of the suggestions look so straightforward it seems ridiculous they aren't already in place. Others are clearly destined to run straight up against international trade agreements and politicians' distaste for measures that are likely to lose them votes.

Turning to sources of renewable power and cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 3 per cent each year are familiar concepts, but ones which people probably feel they have no real power to influence. Stopping using damaging products, or even banning them, is quite different, though. Juniper's reaction to patio heaters ("metal monstrosities") feels a little bit like being told to turn your music down by your parents, but trying to heat a garden up while the planet is ailing from global warming is probably best avoided.

Vegetarians will enjoy the section entitled "Feeding Frenzy", where modern farming and eating habits are brought to task ("Cut meat consumption by half"). Animal Rights campaigners will revel in the ideas intended to support the "Fabric of Life". It's inspiring to find all of this thought gathered in one volume.

Best of Young American Novelists, introduction by Ian Jack (GRANTA £12.99)

There are better ways of spending £13 than investing in this uneven collection of writing: buying a copy of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, for example, Ferris being a bizarre omission from this roll-call of America's most promising authors aged under 35.

The collection mixes excerpts from soon-to-be-published novels with new stories. Among the better offerings is Daniel Alarcon's "The King is Always Above the People". A low-key story about a young man who leaves his parents and pregnant girlfriend to live in the capital city of a country recently emerged from a dictatorship, it's a straightforward existential quest. Alarcon's talent for understatement and bringing together unlikely characters make it special. Elsewhere even the most promising pieces show signs of weakness or self-indulgence. Gary Shteyngart's "From the Diaries of Lenny Abramov", footnoted journal entries from a man in Rome, is hilarious and clever but reads too much like a loose stand-up comedy routine. He's also one of those writers who likes to drop in an unlikely adjective now and again ("we did doggy on the roof and the Roman sunlight lit up her big moony ass just so").

Perhaps it's absurd to judge novelists on anything other than a novel. Jonathan Safran Foer's story is childish and pretentious, but it gives no indication of how naïve and banal his last book was; "Buffalo Soldiers", the excerpt from ZZ Packer's novel in progress, feels too exposed, like a tortoise slipped out of its shell.

Where There's a Will There's a Way, by Laurie Maguire (NICHOLAS BREARLEY PUBLISHING £9.99)

In 1999 Laurie Maguire PhD had a bad year: "I broke my heart and had a delayed adolescence. My investments plummeted and I went down with pneumonia. To cap it all, my cleaning lady threw out the handwritten manuscript of my new book." Being in the United States at the time, the "land of self-help philosophy", she read her way through the entire self-help section of her local bookshop. Then she realised she'd seen it all before: in Shakespeare.

Maguire knows her Shakespeare; but whatever persuaded her to try and frame her ideas like this? There's certainly a place for an accessible book about the way depression's treated in Hamlet, or how The Merchant of Venice deals with risk taking. People continue to read Shakespeare precisely because his work remains relevant and the themes of his plays make profound sense to contemporary audiences across the world. The trouble with this project is that it seems pitched at people incapable of working that out for themselves - readers who have presumably never read Shakespeare; ones impressed to see a PhD mentioned on a book jacket.

You may share Maguire's enthusiasm and enjoy being reminded why your hackles rise whenever somebody starts muttering about his work being over-rated or irrelevant. If not, it's doubtful whether this book will persuade you to begin reading the plays now. It's a pity. If she'd cut out the lame self-help rhetoric and ratcheted up the intellectual content so Shakespeare lovers won't feel patronised, there could have been a great book here.

In Praise of Navigation, ed. P C Evans & Paul Vincent (SEREN £9.99)

British bookshelves hardly groan beneath the weight of Dutch works in translation, so this anthology of 20th century Dutch short stories is something of a curiosity. The title is a play on the Netherlands' seafaring history: a reference to the daring scope of a collection by authors who "on this occasion have chosen small craft in which to set sail... venturing imaginatively across wide expanses of ocean".

Half the stories are centred on the sea, informed by a sense of distance and silence; and rendered in prose that seems to form itself in this other medium, to be picked up by the waves and fairly washed on to the page. In Anna Blaman's "The Swimmer", a beach discussion of what might be done to improve human behaviour is positioned against the presumed suicide of a bather, while in "Larrios", an intense narrative swirls around the divergent paths across the world of a man and a woman; one an adventurer of the sea, the other a prostitute. As in many of the stories here, absences and the impossibility of true communication loom, as people, places, and things, acquire and lose meaning with the passage of time.

The other pieces retain these themes, but are located inland. A second wife's identity is subsumed by her predecessor; an old writer in a post-revolutionary state finds his marriage preserved in meticulous detail by the spies of the fallen regime; and a journalist visiting England to research Siegfried Sassoon finds old family wounds reopened, as the class systems of England and his country intertwine against the backdrop of a fox hunt.

Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips (GIBSON SQUARE £8.99)

How does a book claiming to have identified Britain as a "hub for Islamist terror throughout Europe and beyond" manage to encompass a rant about the Gender Recognition Act and a defence of an elderly man who was recently fined £300 for displaying a placard stating "Stop Immorality. Stop homosexuality. Stop lesbianism"? According to Daily Mail hack Melanie Phillips, both are evidence of a change in British moral and cultural values that has left the way clear for Muslim extremists to thrive. "During the 1960s," she writes, "the most influential thinker was Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. He grasped that the most effective way of overturning Western society was to subvert its culture and morality."

What Phillips doesn't say is that Gramsci's ideas were formulated after he was imprisoned for challenging Mussolini's pre-war fascist state and he died in 1937. It's disorientating to see him reanimated as the latest bête noir of Middle England; but the way Phillips invokes him is revealing. All good propagandists know it's more effective to remove details from their original context and realign them in a configuration best suiting their arguments. This book's cover image, a group of burkha-clad women staring out at the world angrily, illustrates the point perfectly. In very small type on the back cover there's a note stating that the image was taken after eight early-morning arrests in Birmingham - hardly an event likely to inspire goodwill, especially when some of the men were quickly released without charge.