Paperbacks: The Internationals<br/>Josephine<br/>Friends<br/>Elizabeth Costello<br/>Writing Across Worlds<br/>Thursbitch<br/>Peyton Amberg

Sarah May's third novel boldly steps out of the comfort zone with a bleak story of international conflict.

The Internationals by Sarah May (VINTAGE £6.99 (217pp))

Sarah May's third novel boldly steps out of the comfort zone with a bleak story of international conflict. The year is 1999, and Macedonia is awash with refugees from Kosovo. A landlocked republic "not at war" and "not at peace", as the unimpressive president tells his wife, its littered beauty spots are now home to a Babel-like gathering of Albanians, international aid workers, diplomats and journalists. The novel tracks the 78 days from the start of the Nato air strikes to the withdrawal of Serb forces from Northern Kosovo. Opening in a series of vignettes, May's novel unfolds with all the mysterious charm of a foreign-language film. During the first few pages we spend time in the president's limo, share an espresso with a copywriter, and step inside the head of a depressed embassy wife. These scenes are gradually interwoven with the lives of aid workers at a refugee camp. New recruits include Donatella, who has long "discarded the pursuit of happiness", and Guy, a volunteer with an "arts foundation course in puppetry". An arms deal and a murder jump-start the plot, but May is more interested in character than conspiracy. With impressive maturity, she exposes the jaded lives of international do-gooders - a group of people only slightly less desperate than the refugees they are there to help. EH

Josephine by Andrea Stuart (PAN £8.99 (458pp))

Not tonight, Josephine? In the early days of the affair between Napoleon, the upstart Corsican, and the star courtesan Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie, the erotic rebuff would surely have gone the other way. Andrea Stuart's stylish, astute and compelling biography of the "Rose of Martinique" refreshes this familiar tale in several ways. It unearths the Caribbean family roots that left Rose (renamed by her Emperor) an outsider in Paris; it reveals her key role as a European taste-maker in design, fashion and gardening; and it explains how her peerless social graces humanised - house-trained, virtually - the world-shaking oddball she came to adore. BT

Friends by Lisa Gee (BLOOMSBURY £7.99 (238pp))

At last, the antidote to those grating Mars-and-Venus self-help books that assume, and try to deepen, a vast metaphysical chasm between male and female emotions. Lisa Gee's frank, breezy and sturdily written account of friendship between men and women argues that the sexes can understand each other, that non-sexual friendship means more than failed or repressed romance, and that we all belong on "the same planet". So level-headed, so sensible, that it's downright shocking in an era when all pop psychology and TV ads entrench the "extreme separatist culture". Friends has nothing to do with cheesy sitcom, but tells a feelgood story all the same. BT

Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee (VINTAGE £6.99 (230pp))

JM Coetzee may have eschewed his own Booker prize award ceremony, but his latest heroine jumps through the publicity hoops like a "tired circus seal". Elizabeth Costello, a distinguished Australian writer-philosopher, is an old hand at the literary circuit. Coetzee convincingly inhabits the interior world of this catty old lady of letters with an ego to match any man's. Costello's son, a college professor who stage-manages his mother's public appearances, is one of the few to doubt her credentials, finding it puzzling "that a woman who wrote books for a living should always be so bad at telling bedtime stories". EH

Writing Across Worlds ed Susheila Nasta (ROUTLEDGE £10.99 (381pp))

For 20 years, Wasafiri magazine has opened doors on to a new landscape of boundary-busting global literature in English. It has both showcased the work of major writers from Africa, the Caribbean and the Subcontinent, and tracked the evolution of cutting-edge fiction from black and Asian British authors. This invaluable anthology of interviews presents what Salman Rushdie (one of the book's subjects, along with VS Naipaul, Michael Ondaatje, Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Monica Ali and 22 others) calls "voices talking about everything in every possible way". More details on Wasafiri itself from www.wasafiri.org. BT

Thursbitch by Alan Garner (VINTAGE £6.99 (158pp))

Set in his native Cheshire, Garner's second novel for adults is a fiercely pagan affair. Alternating between Jack Turner, an 18th-century pedlar, and two latter-day scientists, Ian and Sally, both narratives centre on a ruined farmhouse in boggy marsh. As ever, Garner revels in topological secrets and ancient place-names, drawing together stories in a primeval endgame. Fans of his children's books will indulge the weakness for bucolic riddles and midsummer ritual; newcomers might be less tolerant. EH

Peyton Amberg by Tama Janowitz (BLOOMSBURY £7.99 (352pp))

Tama Janowitz is still best known for Slaves of New York (1986), but unlike fellow brat-packers has written plenty of good books since. This novel's angry heroine is an office-worker who sees no future beyond the nine-to-five. Underestimating the value of her baby-doll looks, she "settles for" Barry Amberg, a nebbishy dentist. Her new job as a travel agent leads her into miserable sexcapades with men, most too cheap to foot the hotel bill. Fay Weldon territory, with a New World twist. EH

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