Paperbacks: War Crimes for the Home<br></br>The World Below<br></br>Indelible Acts<br></br>Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures<br></br>Offcomer

War Crimes for the Home by Liz Jensen (Bloomsbury, £6.99, 227pp)

Just how life can turn a loving young woman into a dirty-minded old biddy is at the heart of Liz Jensen's unsettling new novel. Unlike her previous books, which have boldly crossed time zones and genres from evolutionary fables to futuristic fantasies, this one is set more conventionally in Forties England – though Jensen's Home Front proves as lethal an arena as any a D-Day beach. The East End heroine, Gloria, is a munitions worker living in Bristol. The day she falls in love is also the day one of her co-workers loses "a quarter of herself" on the factory floor. Gloria, too, is soon to be diminished: her involvement with a US airman triggers a series of events that will overshadow the rest of her life. The affair is related as a mix of the banal and the divine, and the best sections of the novel describe Gloria's first contact with real sexual passion. Not that this is your run-of-the-mill blackout romance. Jensen's writing is too fresh and original for that. Narrated by both the youthful Gloria, and Gloria 50 years on (now on the edge of dementia and "widdling" her pants in an old people's home), her memories are a rackety bundle of coarse insight and regret. Jensen's achievement is to sustain this prickly first-person diatribe, however unlikeable Gloria and her subject matter get. The novel revisits familiar territory – handsome GIs, bluebirds and Lucky Strikes – while giving a powerful sense of the miserable consequences of wartime misalliance.

The World Below by Sue Miller (Bloomsbury, £6.99, 275pp)

Sue Miller, author of The Good Mother, made her name writing about the conflict between maternal and erotic love. Now, 15 years on, The World Below re-visits similar themes, charting the marital mishaps of a grandmother and granddaughter who, separated by generations, share a laundry load of complications. The central character, Catherine, is a twice-divorced mother from San Francisco, her grandma (whose secret cache of letters she discovers), a seemingly serene New England homemaker. Not Miller's most electric novel, this is still a generous slice of domestic realism and Martha Stewart-style interior decor.

Indelible Acts by A L Kennedy (Vintage, £6.99, 212pp)

A L Kennedy's early fiction verged on the fantastical, and though her stories were always arresting, their emotional drift was sometimes hard to decipher. Her latest collection of short stories is another kettle of fish: 12 tales on the theme of longing, in particular the search for reciprocal love. Kennedy writes with precision, wit and anger about relationships in full bloom or decline, her more poetic asides adding to, rather than distracting from, the main chance. Encounters range from a flirtation in a cheese shop to the title story, in which two lovers experiment in the ruins of Rome.

Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures by Ziauddin Sardar (Pluto Press, £14.99, 374pp)

There is a two-word answer to the charge that Muslims who remain serious about faith have failed to engage with the science, culture and politics of the contemporary world. The words are "Ziauddin Sardar". For two decades, this prolific polymath has kept up a steady, persuasive stream of books, essays and articles (for The Independent, among others) that connect the latest waves of Western thought with the past and present state of Islam. Of course, he frequently finds not harmony but lacerating tensions. This invaluable sampler of his strenuous, but satisfying, work offers no pat solutions but a truly invigorating quest.

Offcomer by Jo Baker (Vintage, £6.99, 294pp)

The low self-esteem and hypersensitivity of youth is captured in Jo Baker's arresting debut about an Oxford student grappling with the art of growing up. Claire leaves her Lancashire roots for the dreaming spires, to endure three years of cold lodgings and instant coffee. Here she meets Alan, an aspiring academic, whom she follows to Belfast. Written from the viewpoint of a smart young woman barely able to lift her eyes from pavement level, Baker's novel tracks the anxieties (and self-harming habits) of a soul cut adrift.