Paperbacks: What Happens Now<br/>Freakonomics<br/>Ghost Portrait<br/>Conversations With my Gardener<br/>Two in a Boat: A marital rite of passage<br/>A Long, Long Way

What Happens Now by Jeremy Dyson (Abacus £10.99)

Alistair Black is a reclusive teenager who's created an imaginary country called Travulia and populated it with hundreds of fictitious inhabitants. These characters' stories are then committed to cassette tape in their individual voices, a process that's yielded an archive of 317 tapes. Suddenly, however, Alistair is wrenched away from the seclusion of his private world when a teacher encourages him to audition for a children's TV series called Then and Now. Every week a "Then" episode, featuring a historical drama, is followed up by a "Now" episode portraying modern-day events somehow related to it. Alistair becomes so overwhelmed by the process of making an episode abouta Jewish family hiding from the Nazis, that the "Now" part begins to look like it's occurring in his own life. Filming provokes a reaction that haunts him and his friend Alice into adulthood.

Subtle clues, such as the revelation that Alistair takes the anti-psychotic drug Haloperidol, and some great foreshadowing (memories of a childhood trip to the dentist's and a rehearsal for Then and Now that goes grotesquely wrong both point to what happens during filming) make sure the reader never feels entirely lost. Sometimes there are too many cultural references from the 1970s and 1980s, conjuring up a nostalgia that fights with the beautiful sense of pathos hanging over the whole novel, but it's a minor fault. Dyson's one of those rare authors who can write from the heart while still creating something deceptively clever and complex.

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner (Penguin £8.99)

Steven D Levitt is an economics professor at Harvard. The recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark medal (for the best American economist under 40), he has made a name for himself by asking economic questions that other people either haven't thought of or, perhaps, thought were too tacky or controversial. What do Sumo wrestlers and teachers have in common, and how do they both cheat the system? Why is it more dangerous for your children if you have a swimming pool in your garden than a gun in your closet? And why, most controversially, did the American crime rate suddenly go down in the 1990s? The answer to this last is probably the most brilliant piece of lateral thinking in this whole book: as Levitt points out, abortion was legalised in 1973. Suddenly, there were fewer unwanted children growing up.

It somehow doesn't seem to matter that, later in the book, we learn that it is just as likely to be your genes that make you successful (or not) as your upbringing. Dubner, the journalist half of the team, clearly has an excellent sense for storytelling, and each chapter functions a bit like a puzzle or a detective story. The reader is encouraged to try to work out why, for example, most drug dealers live with their mothers; then the data is presented, analysed and the answer (because they're managed just like McDonald's employees) is revealed. This can feel like the science of the bleeding obvious. But a new understanding of why your estate agent rips you off is probably worth the price of the book.

Ghost Portrait by Gregory Norminton (Sceptre £7.99)

As with much historical fiction, starting to read this book is a little like being asked to join a dance you barely know the steps to; one that seems a little ridiculous until you're into the swing of it. It's a testament to Norminton's storytelling skills that a 17th-century idiom regularly launching descriptions like "the pastry coffin of the evening's meat" (presumably some kind of pie) at the reader soon feels as comfortable as a Leveller's boot.

William Stroud calls to visit the elderly, almost blind painter Nathaniel Deller, his former teacher. Before long the old man is groping around in a secret priest hole to show William the last paintings he worked on before his sight deteriorated. He makes William a proposition: if the young man can complete a portrait of Deller's dead wife, he can court his daughter. It's a neat premise that allows Norminton to write a simple story while engaging with a range of cultural and social concerns. Art is discussed in a low-key but highly informed fashion, and the Digger community (Diggers proposed cultivating common land to support their communities) at Cobham Heath, Surrey, is described in detail, but always in the context of the human drama.

Much historical fiction thrives on caricature, but the characters in Ghost Portrait live and breathe, full of memories and regret. Readers normally averse to books rooted in the distant past should give this one a chance. The first few pages may be a shock to the system, but the rest will more than justify it.

Conversations With my Gardener by Henri Cueco trs George Miller (Granta £6.99)

Translated from the original French, this curious memoir from the artist and writer Henri Cueco, almost exclusively made up of dialogue, is a very odd proposition indeed. Did Cueco wander around with a tape recorder stuck under his gardener's nose? Whatever the modus operandi, the result is charming and, in its more cryptic moments, genuinely compelling. The fact that Cueco has indicated the small amount of action in a similar style to a screenplay helps spur the reader on. In places, it reads a little like Ionesco.

Up to a point the conversations seem random: a series of mundane encounters offset by the odd weird detail or stab at profundity that prevents matters from dropping off into banality. The gardener visits the artist in Paris, for example. Cueco picks him up at the railway station and finds his luggage is very heavy: "Have you got gold bars in your suitcase?" asks Cueco. "An anvil," replies the gardener. He's brought it so he can teach Cueco how to hammer out a scythe. "No one knows how to do it any more," says the gardener. "With machines now no one needs a scythe. "

Underpinning the whole project is, however, a need to broach the curse of mortality. Du Pont the Baker drops dead without warning (according to the gardener he looked fine the day before: "a bit pale, maybe, but then he had flour on his face. This morning they found him with his nose in it" ); a man called Bardagaud who used to cycle down the hill making a " ding-a-ling" noise with his mouth gets run over by a car; and, in the end, the gardener himself grows sick.

Two in a Boat: A marital rite of passage by Gwyneth Lewis (Harper Perennial £7.99)

Gwyneth Lewis is a poet - Wales's first National Poet - not a sailor. But prompted by a tarot reader who says she isn't living her life to the full and should go and buy a boat, she takes voluntary redundancy and invests the money she receives in a 30-year-old yacht called Jameeleh. Deciding to let their house out, she and husband Leighton go to live on the boat and start learning to sail in the Bristol channel. One day they hope to cross the Atlantic and sail through the Panama canal to the Pacific.

Unfortunately, apart from the obvious hurdles (like having no idea how to sail a yacht), Lewis has other demons to conquer before she and Leighton can realise their dream. She is still emerging from a long bout of clinical depression and is prone to falling asleep whenever they set off in the Bristol channel - either that or being seasick. Leighton, on the other hand, is an experienced sea dog (Lewis likes to be called a sea bitch) who's served 10 years in the merchant navy. Theirs, she writes, was "not an obvious marriage"; he was 23 years older than her and, when they met, she was "pretty much in a personal gutter" thanks to " creeping depression and self-medication with alcohol". Leighton, who had given up drinking a couple of years earlier, helped her recover.

Eventually the couple do set sail across the Atlantic, but alongside their battles with the sea a domestic drama unfolds as their marriage threatens to unravel. With Lewis free from her depression, what role is there for Leighto n? A genuine voyage of discovery.

A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry (Faber £7.99)

When you read the beginning of a book and continually find yourself crashing up against sentences starting with the word "and", you know you've either got a fixation for the King James Bible or you're reading an important novel with a weighty theme. And such is the case with Sebastian Barry's story of Willie Dunne, a young man caught between the trenches of the First World War and the politics of his native Ireland.

Willie is too short to become a policeman like his father, but this saves him from participating in the violent task of maintaining order on Dublin's streets, where men like James Larkin are galvanising workers to fight for their rights. During a vicious baton charge an acquaintance of Willie's father is seriously injured, something that pricks the policeman's conscience so that Willie is soon running errands to the invalid with gifts. On one such visit Willie meets the man's young daughter and falls in love - a relationship that sustains him at the beginning of the conflict, but which suffers, like so many other things, as the tide of events in Dublin overwhelms any idea that a young man fighting many miles away in Flanders could be a hero.

Barry's lyrical style will grate with some. His powers of description are, however, an unquestionable plus; scenes like the first time Willie encounters poison gas, a creeping yellow smoke that slowly silences the birds, scorches the grass and then kills the unwitting soldiers, are terrifying. This book speaks for the young men who joined up in the hope of uniting the different Irish factions, only to be regarded after the war as traitors.