Paperbacks: The Dedalus Book of Finnish FantasyA Life Stripped BareReader, I Married HimMean With MoneyA Burnable TownConsider the Lobster

The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, ed Johanna Sinisalo (SERPENT'S TAIL £7.99)

These stories have two common denominators: nature and war. As Sinisalo explains, Finland is a sparsely populated country with enough room for its citizens to form close ties with nature; and, throughout its history, the country has been torn between the empires of Sweden and Russia, both of which took their turn to dictate the language in which fiction was written. "Wolf Bride", by Aino Kallas, is set in the mid-17th century. Aalo, a woodsman's wife, hears someone call to her while she is watching a wolf hunt. Later, she can't resist an urge to join the wolves in the forest and becomes a werewolf. At night she runs with wolves, by day she plays the part of a devoted wife. It's an eerie tale with an unexpected ending.

Tove Jansson is best known for her Moomintroll stories, but her piece here is definitely for adults. Following an unspecified disaster, a wife "shops" for her injured husband by climbing through shattered windows and looking for food among the wreckage inside. When her husband complains that he is not able to protect them, she rounds on him: "Did it ever occur to you that in my whole life I've never been able to take care of matters and make decisions about things that are important?" The editor's own offering, "Transit", tells how a young autistic girl speaks for the first time in 14 years and persuades a drunken hellraiser to help her steal some dolphins. These excellent stories share an edginess that's quite distinct from the quirkiness many contemporary English writers prefer to celebrate.

A Life Stripped Bare, by Leo Hickman (EDEN/GUARDIAN £7.99)

How grim it is when a journalist decides to do something unusual for a day/week/year and then write about it. Well, usually, anyway. This book - in which Leo Hickman gets "ethically audited" by three experts and tries to follow their advice for the year - actually seems unique in that there are not a clutch of banal jokes on every page, and not everyone the author meets is a hilarious nutter. The tone is just right for this book's target market - presumably other middle-class professionals - and, certainly for the first half, presents ways of ethical living in a sober, thoughtful and very un-threatening way. Most readers will identify with the "Mangetout Moment: the small rush of guilt that tells you that what you're doing - buying, say, a small pack of mangetout that's been air-freighted ... to the supermarket shelf before you is somehow a negative force on the world", as they will with Leo and his wife Jane's desires to only make the kinds of changes their lives can accommodate easily, rather than becoming "tree-huggers" overnight. So Hickman gets a wormery, persuades Jane they should try washable nappies, orders an organic vegetable box every week, cleans the house with vinegar and bicarb and learns about gardening.

Although there is much that is inspiring here, in the end this all feels so insipid. The Hickmans simply like meat too much to try giving it up, and Leo Hickman's plans to visit an abattoir come to nothing. They try an eco-holiday, but by the end of the book conclude that it's difficult to imagine their lives without long-haul flights.

Reader, I Married Him, by Michèle Roberts (VIRAGO £6.99)

Chekhov once famously stipulated that if a writer introduces a gun in the first chapter of a story, then in the second or third chapter it must be discharged. This story begins with a gun belonging to the narrator's mother and, albeit more slowly than Chekhov may have suggested, proceeds to its inevitable conclusion.

Aurora, aka Dawn, is a middle-aged woman who has recently been widowed for the third time. Each of her husbands has died accidentally: the bohemian roadie, Tom; the dry academic, Cecil; and the Catholic hiker, Hugh. Without a husband, Aurora is not sure who she really is: "As a widow, without the structure of marriage to show me what to do, I had no idea who I was any more... Alone, I could be anything." Smothered by her stepmother, Aurora decides to visit her friend Leonora, a "terrific feminist" who is now the abbess of a convent in Padenza, and who has organised a conference on the Annunciation and the Visitation. The rompish tone of this book makes it clear that all characters, however minor, will end up in Padenza, to take part in something that, were it not for the continuing existence of the gun, might seem rather like a light comedy. The last line of this novel is wonderful, but only a very patient reader will make it that far. Unreliable narrators can tell you many lies, and conceal as much as they like from you - but they should still be plausible. This one, despite quoting from every novel on the Eng Lit 101 syllabus, is never seen reading an actual book.

Mean With Money, by Hunter Davies (POMONA £9.990

Hunter Davies is probably best-known as the author of a very popular Beatles biography. Failing that, there's his newspaper column "Me and My Money", which serves as the source for this book. In fact, the author alleges, the book's title is a mistake; it started off being called the same thing as his column, but one day a new sub-editor at Pomona misheard the name and thought it was called "Mean With Money". However the change occurred, it's very apt. From the first chapter, "Why Haven't My Kids Got the Miser's Touch", through to the last, "Dying to Know the Outcome", in which Davies contemplates the misery of dying without ever knowing whether "Equitable Life ever paid back all the thousands I believe I am owed", these are the words of a man who's more than careful with his cash.

Interspersed between the snippets of generally deflating news, such as word from Davies's accountant that for the third year running he's earned less than his wife, there are dozens of odd facts, anecdotes, quotations and observations about money compiled because, he thought, "even for bedside or lavatory reading" a mere collection of his columns might be a little thin. "Use essential oils for general cleaning," for example. They're "very economical as you use so little". We also learn that in old age the composer Rossini was so unsure of his financial security that, when he heard a group of admirers had raised £20,000 to erect a statue of him, he told them: "Give me the money ...And I'll stand on the pedestal myself." All helpful reading when confronted with post-Christmas bills.

A Burnable Town, by Philip Davison (CAPE £11.99)

This is a curious book; a thriller that seems oddly out of time - part le Carré, part Graham Greene, but with a nudge towards something more contemporary. The narrator, Harry Fielding, and his former apprentice, Johnny Weeks, are lying low in Spain following a botched bit of violent politicking within MI5. Harry is a damaged man: he has a stab wound inflicted by his and Weeks' betrayer in the secret service, Jack Bradley (also his wife's lover), and he's grieving for his old friend, Alfie. It's a gamble, then, when he returns to London and resumes work at a desk job. Will he crack up? Can he tolerate banal office politics? Matters aren't helped when he's told to turn a blind eye towards Bradley, and when his brother starts visiting HQ, causing a commotion. Meanwhile Weeks returns from Spain intent on killing Bradley - something Harry's controller won't allow to happen.

Davison is at his best when he's writing about the nuances of human behaviour. The scenes where Clements coolly interrogates a would-be bomber are excellent: "Clements sat a long time with his pet bomber. Neither man spoke. When Clements abruptly got up to leave, the subject rose to his feet, apparently before he quite realised what he was doing." Unfortunately he's less adept at creating tension. The various asides about Harry's relations flesh out his idiosyncratic inner world, but this seems to be at the expense of any consistent pace in the narrative. Some thoroughly compelling scenes and the odd page of cracking dialogue aren't enough to stop this novel feeling peculiarly disjointed and lacklustre.

Consider the Lobster, by David Foster Wallace (ABACUS £10.99)

Both here and in Foster Wallace's native US, writers and critics have sunk to their knees proclaiming his genius. More fool they. The author may be a professor of creative writing, but this collection of essays reads like the posturing of an overbearing undergraduate, gorged on his own wit and highly evolved sense of style (which his impressionable contemporaries find scintillating).

"Authority and American Usage", ostensibly a review of Bryan A Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage, rattles on about the politics of language in a way that may have dazzled the readers of Harper's but it contains as much original thought as a bus ticket. There isn't even much that's contentious. This writing is all about effect: stick it under any decent academic's nose and they would have a good deal of trouble working out what all the fuss is about. They might be amused by the author's style, a kind of Jazz Age poncing about punctuated by earthy moments of ironic detachment, but after 50 or so pages that wears very thin indeed.

In "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart", the author calls on the tennis player's "breathtakingly insipid autobiography" to help "us" (he frequently invites the reader to join his special club) understand "both the seduction and the disappointment that seem to be built into the mass-market sports memoir". "Big Red Son" sees him attend the annual AVN (Adult Video News) awards and pass trite but eloquent and extensively footnoted comment on the porn industry. Consider the lobster, indeed: is it better to be boiled alive or left with nothing to read but this drivel?