Paperbacks: Who's Sorry Now?<br></br>A Fanatic Heart<br></br>Who's Who in Hell<br></br>The Man Who Walks<br></br>Peacemakers

Everything you want to know about men, and plenty you don't: Howard Jacobson's masterly seventh novel takes two very different kinds of married men, and lets them loose in each other's worlds.

Marvin Kreitman is a middle-aged man who loves his mother and his wife and his two almost grown-up daughters. He also loves his five mistresses, and isn't averse to adding to his harem. His best male friend, Charlie, is of a more monogamous bent. Not only does he share his wife's first name, but co-authors children's books with her, and is seemingly happily wedded to a marital life of "nice sex" and comfortable cords. Each week the two friends meet for a Soho lunch, and spend most of the time skirting around the conversations they would really like to have. Until one life-changing lunchtime when Charlie, overcome by uncharacteristic urges in the nether regions, suggests that they swap women – Mrs Charlie for any one of Kreitman's stable.

More than just an energetic sexual farce, Jacobson scrutinises male desire with a Roth-like seriousness of purpose. Unafraid to expose the ludicrous, monstrous and politically incorrect, he plunges the depths of our baser yearnings and desires. In Kreitman, Jacobson has realised a subtle and complex character – a man in love with unhappiness who only feels truly alive when "suffering the pain of hope gone begging, of thwarted desire and of unbearable loss". A novel about sex that approaches the subject from every position in the book.

A Fanatic Heart by Edna O'Brien (Phoenix, £7.99, 461pp)

IF YOU haven't read an Edna O'Brien novel since your teenage days, it might come as a surprise just how good a writer she is. This collection of stories incorporates work published between the mid-Sixties and the early Eighties. The stories, all set in Ireland, are mostly about women: women unhappy with men, women unhappy without men, and, more often than not, women tottering on the edge. Set in the raw rural landscape for which O'Brien is so well known, these anguished stories speak of childish innocence betrayed, and a lifetime's worth of adult disappointment.

Who's Who in Hell by Robert Chalmers (Atlantic Books, £7.99, 360pp)

First-time novelist Robert Chalmers crams much into his smartly written story of modern love and metropolitan mores. His hero, Daniel, moves from working as a therapist to writing obituaries. The most important thing in his life, however, is his ill-advised relationship with an American called Laura. This is a novel that sparkles with comic set pieces. At one point Daniel's boss epigrammatises a dead school teacher thus: "He never married because hypocrisy ... wasn't a word in his lexicon, and because he was a proselytizing homosexual who liked to spend his evenings sashaying around Hebden Bridge in a skirt."

The Man Who Walks by Alan Warner (Vintage, £6.99, 280pp)

Alan Warner is the author of three award-winning novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands and The Sopranos. This fourth novel, like its predecessors, is set in the West Highlands, and speaks in the same language on the same subjects: getting pissed, getting high and staying poor. It's the story of "the Nephew" who learns that his uncle has gone walkabout with £27,000 stolen from a pub in Oban. His destination is Culloden Moor, via several soon-to-be-defiled Bonnie Scotland Heritage sites. Irvine Welsh gone native.

Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan (John Murray, £9.99, 574pp)

Deserving winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, this pacey and racy account of the statesmen who reshaped the world at the Paris peace conference of 1919 puts the dash back into diplomatic history. Its first reviewers warmed to the colourful portraits of Lloyd George (Margaret MacMillan's great-grandad!), Clemenceau, Wilson et al, and wrestled with the revisionist idea that defeated Germany got off quite lightly at Versailles. Now, its shrewd assessments of the unfinished global business of 1919 strike home: nowhere more forcefully than in the botched creation of "Iraq" from three ill-assorted Ottoman provinces. "Iraq", by the way, means "the well-rooted country".