Paperbacks: The Road to Oxiana; Big BabiesField Notes From a CatastropheThe Mercurial EmperorHomo BritannicusThe Ladies of Grace AdieuThe Speed of Light

The Road to Oxiana, by Robert Byron (Penguin £8.99)

The genre of the highly personal, humorously-inflicted travel book was largely an invention of Evelyn Waugh and his contemporary Robert Byron. First published in 1937 and now issued as a Penguin Classic with a valuable introduction by Colin Thubron, The Road to Oxiana is an informed, somewhat high-flown account of the early Islamic architecture of Persia and Afghanistan wrapped in a comic narrative that ensured a far wider readership. Seventy years on, Byron's views can be startling (he savages the giant Buddhas of Bamian, recently destroyed by the Taliban: "It is their negation of sense, the lack of any pride in their monstrous, flaccid bulk, that sickens") and his humour still tickles. His entry in a Persian police form that he and his companion were respectively accompanied by "un djinn" and "un livre par Henry James" is worthy of an earlier, better-known Byron. Though his prose is not free of purple descriptive patches, many of Byron's exchanges would fit happily in a travel book today. "Have you any medicines in your baggage?" "Yes." "Will you give me one? I want the kind that will make me please the ladies in Herat." Funny, didactic and biting, Byron's masterpiece (he died at sea in 1941) transports us across the world and, better still, across the decades to splendidly alien lands. CH

Big Babies, by Michael Bywater (Granta £7.99)

The target of Bywater's bitterly amusing polemic is characterised in one of the vignettes scattered through the book. A bank customer in Cambridge wears "trainers with lights that flash... One hand is in his shorts pocket, wagging his testicles, the other is holding an ice-cream cone. On his head is a baseball cap, sideways." The shocking fact is that this is no satire. We see such goons all the time and marketers urge us to be complicit in their vacuity. Slamming the "perpetually infantilised Boom Generation" with impressive energy, Bywater continues his bracing rant even in the index: "underwear, slimy, worn as outerwear, 91". CH

Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert (Bloomsbury £7.99)

After this summer's weather, it is no surprise that this compelling account of worldwide climate change by a New Yorker often touches on Britain. A warmer Earth means higher seas (warm water expands) and changing precipitation patterns. "The effect is likely to be particularly punishing in densely populated region including... the Thames basin." Floods may be just the start. Melting of the Greenland ice-sheet, which has doubled in pace since 1996, could force saltwater to the ocean bed and turn off the Gulf Stream. "Britain could become much colder, even as the planet warms up.". CH

The Mercurial Emperor, by Peter Marshall (Pimlico £12.99)

Rather like our own George V with his stamp collection, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) sought escape from affairs of state with his Kunstkammer. This cabinet of curiosities in Prague Castle contained a bell that would "summon the dead", a 6ft "unicorn horn" and the "Holy Grail". He also collected beliefs (Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, the Cabala...) and wise men, such as Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Dr Dee, the Elizabethan magus. Marshall's account of this weird but free-thinking court, where modern science melded with the occult, glitters with interest on every page. CH

Homo Britannicus, by Chris Stringer (Penguin £8.99)

The susceptibility of Britain to climatic change is underlined in this revelatory work about the oscillations of early human life in Britain. The British date back a mere 12,000 years. In the preceding 400,000 years, the population was repeatedly swept away by "some of the most violent swings in climate and environment in the history of the earth". Among the earliest indications of the current spell of human occupation are the remains of a six-metre platform on a former lake near Scarborough built 10,500 years ago. Footprints near Goldcliff in the Bristol Channel may belong to women and children finding shellfish 2,000 years later. CH

The Ladies of Grace Adieu, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury £7.99)

In off-cuts from her bestseller, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke revives the world of maids and witches, faeries and princesses, that made that novel such a hit. In these bewitching stories, she revisits several familiar characters, including Strange and Norrell in the creepy title story, as well as revealing the secrets of owls and how to get your sweetheart back from a bad fairy. KG

The Speed of Light, by Javier Cercas (Bloomsbury £7.99)

As in his multiple prize-winning Soldiers of Salamis, Cercas draws a compelling line between historical trauma and today's confusion in this story of a young Spanish teacher in the Mid-West, drawn into the orbit of an elusive Vietnam veteran. In some ways a re-mix of the civil-war motif of Salamis, the novel once more shows a rare ability to braid past and present into gripping narrative – again, with help from Anne McLean's fine translation. BT