Paperbacks: The Weeping Women HotelBeing GazzaHannibal RisingThe Meaning of the 21st CenturyThe Idler 39: Lie Back and ProtestThe Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton

The Weeping Women Hotel, by Alexei Sayle (SCEPTRE £7.99)

Harriet is a 38-year-old woman with a broken nose, cheekbone and ribs, who gets off a train at Crewe and books herself in to a hotel where they serve unbelievably comforting breakfasts. The other guests are also battered women, who weep quietly and never seem to want to leave. You probably think you can guess how Harriet has ended up in such a place, but unless your theory includes parrots, a marionette execution, a South American novelist, an obscure form of kung fu and a tin of sardines, you are way off the mark.

Alexei Sayle has turned to writing novels that satirise north London's chattering classes, but he has retained his surreal bent and force of delivery. Harriet is dissatisfied with a life spent between her invisible mending shop and the gastropub, while her thinner sister and her boorish husband work the obscure charity fundraiser circuit. It turns out that hiring a personal trainer is the step that emboldens her to challenge the confines of her bourgeois existence. But it's less because she loses weight, and more to do with the fact that her trainer is a peculiar young man who encourages her to climb trees and plans to become immortal by saving up his seminal fluid.

The Weeping Women Hotel is a smart, weird and funny book about challenging received notions. Sayle has a dig at the irritations and absurdities of modern life, including a few you'd never thought to get irritated about before, but never at the expense of caricaturing his main characters or disturbing the pace of a well-worked narrative.

Being Gazza, by Paul Gascoigne with John McKeown and Hunter Davies (HEADLINE £6.99)

Afrank autobiography excellently ghostwritten by the experienced biographer and football writer Hunter Davies was published in 2004 under the title Gazza: My Story, and revealed Gazza to be a more complex and conflicted character than the buffoon we'd taken him to be. But Being Gazza, which is a 100 per cent proof addiction memoir, reveals the full extent of it: an interconnected set of problems he's had that includes bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, bulimia, depression, anxiety, something called codependency, and addictions to gambling, painkillers, Red Bull and, most of all, alcohol.

When Gazza: My Story ended, he seemed to be getting himself together. With a pathos that comes to seem typical of his story, shortly after, he injured himself during rehearsals for Strictly Ice Dancing. David Seaman subsequently took his place on the show and won it. Gazza, meanwhile, was delighted for his old colleague, but back on the painkillers and before long, everything else. Being Gazza spans the subsequent 18 months, during which he returned to his therapist, John McKeown, and it lays their sessions together bare. McKeown contributes large sections to the book, so that we see just how honest with himself Gazza is being.

There are few highs in the book, and few of the raucous anecdotes of his first autobiography. But as self-lacerating as he is, he isn't self-pitying, and Hunter Davies again retains Gazza's boyish idiom and the irrepressible spirit that makes you think he might just make it yet.

Hannibal Rising, by Thomas Harris (HEINEMANN £11.99)

It's unusual, possibly unprecedented, for the film of a book to have been and gone (to an unimpressed critical response) some time before the book has even been published in paperback. Such is the Faustian pact that Thomas Harris had made with the film producer Dino de Laurentis, who reportedly informed him that if he didn't fancy the job of fleshing out Hannibal Lecter's backstory for a new instalment of the franchise, some other hack could easily be found. (Goethe's Faust supplies the book with one of its epigraphs.) As it happens, some other hack may well have made a better job of Hannibal Rising.

It has none of the careful plotting or tension of the two taut and above-average pulp thrillers that Lecter first had a supporting role in. In Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs he was an unfathomable and genuinely scary psychopath. In this book he's repositioned as the sympathetic avenging hero on a quest, whose later pathologies can all be traced back to the hardship he suffered as a child. He was the aristocratic eight-year-old son of a Lithuanian count, until the Eastern Front swept over their land and he found himself holed up in the woods with his younger sister and a gang of evil Nazis. When winter came and the food ran out, the evil Nazis eventually took his sister, boiled up some water and... well you can guess what happens next. The rest of the novel is set in Paris, where Hannibal is taught how to be an aesthete by his Japanese guardian, and methodically plots his revenge on his sister's killers. Rent the DVD if you want the details.

The Meaning of the 21st Century, by James Martin (EDEN PROJECT £8.99)

Among the 100 or so books written by the rocket scientist, philosopher, philanthropist and "guru of the information age", James Martin, easily the best known is his Pulitzer-nominated 1977 book The Wired Society, which predicted the emergence and impact of the world wide web. This epic new piece of futurology aims no less than to ensure the survival of the human race.

Global warming, loss of biodiversity, overpopulation, water shortages, extreme poverty, viral pandemics, religious extremism, WMD, or any combination thereof, might be enough to end civilisation and plunge us back into a dark age. Or, just as conceivably, homo sapiens could join the ever-growing list of extinct species. But if we can just make it through this rough patch, a clean, renewable energy source will be developed, and a superpower such as China will be well positioned to take advantage of it; computing power and networking bandwidth will continue to increase exponentially, which, coupled with nanotechnology, biotechnology and genetic engineering, will help us construct a new and spectacular future human civilisation.

Martin predicts that there will absolutely be a revolution in the 21st century, the equal of, and a corrective to, the industrial revolution, most likely because we'll be forced in to action in response to catastrophe. It's up to our children to determine how well we cope with the revolution, so get them to read this lively, readable, provocative and occasionally inspiring book as soon as possible.

The Idler 39: Lie Back and Protest, ed Tom Hodgkinson (EBURY £10.99)

Taking a stand, in an arched-eyebrow kind of a way, against the work-consume-work culture, The Idler magazine has always been mildly subversive. In this issue, though, it gets political, and the results are somewhat uneasy.

Gary Roland argues that radicalism is just another lifestyle choice that's catered for by consumerism, and lumps protesting, whining and righteous hand-wringing together as a single "pleasant leisure activity for the radical bourgeoisie" which doesn't harm anyone, but doesn't achieve anything either. Tom Hodgkinson expounds on the theme much less glibly in his piece "The Futility of Protest", but ties himself in knots. He thinks Gandhi's philosophy of passive resistance is "annoying" and "morally superior", which seems to me a moral relativism too far. Star Wars, rap music and game shows somehow come into it because they're analogous to warfare. And he recounts the time when his travel plans were disrupted on 7/7, but he and his friend had a very pleasant time in the pub anyway and thought that it must be what it was like for Londoners during the Blitz. "War anyway, can add intensity to life," he says. Tom, you do know that people are actually being killed in this war, don't you? Ironic provocation is all to the good, but I worry that some readers might think you really mean it.

The magazine's other interviews, features, photo-essays and titbits about gardening, sitting by a fireplace and building a treehouse are for the most part quite diverting.

The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton, by Michael Collins (PHOENIX £6.99)

E Robert Pendleton, a once-promising literary novelist, now teaches creative writing at a mediocre East Coast American liberal arts college. His students think he "sucks", and his only consolations are the spreadsheet in which he charts the incestuous carping of literary critics, and Adi Wiltshire, a buxom grad student "known to have tit-fucked no less than two Pulitzer Prize recipients". But when she turns her attentions to his nemesis, a former colleague who went on to have a glittering literary career, Pendleton decides to commit suicide. He fails at that too.

Michael Collins's most recent novels have been murder-mysteries - brilliant, but dour and steeped in American Gothic - so it's a surprise to find him doing a satirical campus novel. But we're not done yet. While Pendleton persists in a vegetative state in hospital, Adi discovers the manuscript of his existential semi-autobiographical novel, which subsequently becomes a publishing sensation. A grizzled detective notices that the murder of a young girl described in its pages bears a resemblance to a real-life unsolved case, and Pendleton becomes a suspect.

Collins begins by charting familiar territory - desperate lives, dark desires and the underbelly of American society - but with added literary criticism and a metafictional commentary on the detective novel. The delusions of middle-aged literature professors and grisly child-killings make for an uneven tone, and this doesn't grip like Collins's other literary thrillers. But it is consistently intriguing.