Paperbacks: The Prophet Muhammad: A biographyCaligulaHeresiesAmerican SuckerCheckpointFreshers

For Barnaby Rogerson, the life of the Prophet Muhammad is "the Shakespeare, the Aeschylus, the Euripides, the Milton, the Pinter, the complete works of mankind combined in one coherent tale".

The Prophet Muhammad: A biography by Barnaby Rogerson (ABACUS £7.99)

For Barnaby Rogerson, the life of the Prophet Muhammad is "the Shakespeare, the Aeschylus, the Euripides, the Milton, the Pinter, the complete works of mankind combined in one coherent tale". So it's a shame, in both senses of the word, that it isn't better known by non-Muslims in the West. At not much more than 200 pages, this book allows the secular access to what turns out to be an enlightening and inspirational story.

Rogerson diligently outlines the various religious, economic and socio-political protocols of 6th and 7th century Arabia, and skilfully evokes day to day existence within its harsh, majestic environs. In this way he contextualises the astonishing achievements of a man, born in Mecca in 570AD but orphaned early and raised in a Bedouin caravan, who grew into a thoughtful, well-liked and successful merchant and family man. A man who'd on occasion appeared in some way illuminated or marked out, but was entirely unprepared for the night of the 17th day of Ramadan in 610AD, when he awoke in a cave on Mount Hira gripped by a terrifying embrace and commanded for the first time to recite the word of God. An illiterate man, forced to find a new language (classical Arabic) with which to formulate and spread the Word, who eventually established Islam and a new united Arabia in the process.

Caligula by Allan Massie (SCEPTRE £7.99)

In the popular imagination Caligula was a crazed and lascivious despot who was always having orgies. But then, perhaps we've been influenced by the big-budget 1970s soft-porn version of his life. Allan Massie's novel is adult in the other way, soberly narrated by Lucius, a cynical and politically astute nobleman and friend of the imperial family. It's a gossipy account, a long list of who whispered what to whom and why it got them killed, which effectively gives us the illusion of being close to events, but sadly fails to animate them for us.

We are briefly introduced to Gaius as a lovable boy, away from Rome on a campaign with his father nicknamed Caligula by the soldiers, which translates as something like Bootikins. Then Lucius begins his account of the complex chain of events by which Caligula becomes heir, including the suspicion and machinations that led to the murder of most of his immediate family. Rambling but oddly pedantic narrator that he is, this takes up about half the length of Lucius's book, after which we are reintroduced to Caligula, by now a wild and damaged young man. Once in power, he is exactly as deranged, pathologically sexual and whimsically murderous as we thought, but Lucius allows that it was more a result of his nurture than his nature. "The horrid possibility presents itself: that he displayed his sanity by taking Rome as the hell it is."

Heresies by John Gray (GRANTA £8.99)

We do not live in a secular age and John Gray doubts we ever will. Even in Britain, where he claims that we have repressed the religious impulse like the Victorians repressed sexuality, "the result is not that the need disappears, but rather that it returns in bizarre and perverse forms", such as liberal humanism, or the "fantasy of salvation" through politics or science. Here he heretically denounces these secular faiths; he thinks they're more harmful than their religious counterparts.

All we've done with our scientific advances is repeat the mistakes of the past more effectively. The last century was our most destructive yet, and pointing at the state of the world today, Gray shows that it's equally absurd to put our faith in politicians - although how many of us actually do so any more?

Heresies is collected from essays published in the New Statesman over the past five years, and it does engage directly with the world. But Gray looks at the world from oblique angles and shapes his arguments towards seemingly paradoxical conclusions. Sometimes they're too neat, and sometimes they're backed by unsubstantiated, if not entirely unfounded claims. But frequently he does appear to illuminate fundamental and depressing truths about the human condition. The idea that this service to the world will improve it in any way is probably just another one of those illusions.

American Sucker by David Denby (VIKING £12.99)

Many good novels were written to critique the lifestyles and aspirations of affluent people in the 1980s: I'm thinking of Bonfire of the Vanities, American Psycho and Martin Amis's Money which Denby quotes as his epigraph, but there are countless others. I can't think of any equivalents written about the technology-fuelled boom in the of the late 1990s, although there's been no shortage of navel-gazing memoirs like this one, by people trying to work out where all the money went. Maybe it's because this time all the liberal writers got suckered, falling for all that utopian talk emanating from trendy start-ups in California.

Until his marriage broke down in early 2000, the New Yorker's film critic David Denby maintained a sneering uninterest in investment culture. After a fling with internet pornography (his excessive candour about his personal life is a feature of the book), he immersed himself in the pornography of financial information, poring over the Wall Street Journal and gazing up at the NASDAQ stock ticker in Times Square. He started hanging out at glamorous parties hosted by disgraced CEO Sam Waskal and resolved to make a quick $1m to buy his wife's share of their apartment. Instead he ends the book $900,000 poorer, still a little unsure how it happened, and unclear as to why we should care.

Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker (CHATTO £6.99)

This is a novella in the form of a dialogue recorded between two men in a Washington hotel suite in May of this year. Jay intends to assassinate President Bush, and wants to talk it over with his friend Ben and get it down on tape so that posterity will understand his "piece of dark mischief". He'd tried protesting peacefully, marching on the White House, but to no avail. It's still squatted in by an "unelected fucking oilman... muttering over his prayer book every morning", presiding over a terror bombing campaign and napalming innocent Iraqis.

Ben is horrified by his friend's plan, and tries to talk him out of it. He's a liberal and a Cold War historian, and if anything, even better informed than his friend about the deviousness and corruption of this and earlier American administrations, but resigned to it and inclined to merely wait for Bush to be replaced by another of the hydra's heads in the usual manner.

Inevitably Checkpoint received a hysterical response on its publication in America, where the FBI investigate the authors of far more innocuous comments than Jay's. Its immediacy gives it impact, but in truth it's only a very slight novel. It's a breeze to read and has a good measure of Baker's usual surreal and devious sense of humour, but it's just a piece of provocation, not a story. Merely Baker's own little piece of dark mischief.

Freshers by Kevin Sampson (VINTAGE £6.99)

Every time Kevin Sampson selects a milieu for his novels he leaves himself with ground to make up if he wants us to like his characters. His debut, Awaydays, was about football casuals, then he wrote about the music business and 18-30 package holidays, and Freshers is his campus novel. Students are irritating because they get freedoms and opportunities that everyone else is envious of, and waste them drinking beer at student union prices. And in Freshers they anoint themselves with stupid names like Adrian Dangerous, Lord Cymon of Baswell or Dumbledore, in lieu of a developed personality.

Sampson's narrator Kit, an English student, argues: "Characters do not have to be sympathetic... All that cant about rounded characters and sympathetic leads and story arcs - it's shite." There is an arc to Freshers though. Kit doesn't like most students: he sees through their pretensions and scoffs at their tastes in fashion and music. Of course, his antipathy towards them is born of his own insecurities and a fear of intimacy, but by the book's end he's got drunk with them enough times to have forged friendships and had a sexual experience. In revealing what's under the boisterous façade, Sampson manages to make students sympathetic. But he never solves the problem that there is something intrinsically boring about other people's drunken exploits.