Paperback Roundup

The Dreamer of Dreams by Sean French, Granta pounds 6.99. One of the intellectual low points of the last year came on a Radio 4 series called Lion's Den, in which Lisa Jardine argued before an audience of writers and publishers that the English novel is parochial and dull: stuck in a rut about people who live in Hampstead and write novels and have affairs. When pressed on the point, she was a little short of recent examples of this genre. It's possible, however, that she had this book in mind, since it starts out looking like exactly the sort of thing she's complaining about - Henry Dean is far too feeble to do anything as positive or brash as have an affair or write a novel, but he thinks about them a lot, and he does live in Hampstead. Halfway through, though, it suddenly changes track and heads into much darker and weirder territory, a genuinely scary jaunt into surrealism. It is an insular book; but it is the insularity of nightmare: of being trapped by your life, your family, your own failures. Even in the realist sections of the book there is something off-key and slightly uncanny. French is an acute observer of the rituals of childhood, the smothered resentments and inhibited egoism that underpins family life, and he writes with a journalist's clarity. This is too thoroughly imagined, too odd and individual a book to be slotted into any genre. So if this is by some remote chance what Jardine had in mind when she complained about the state of the English novel - well, what is her problem?

False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism by John Gray, Granta pounds 8.99. You may have noticed that, while global free markets were supposed to bring worldwide prosperity, almost everybody is feeling poorer and less secure. Gray explains why this is happening, and why it should have been obvious that it was going to happen (basically, with trade barriers gone, your highly trained and motivated Western manufacturing workers are going to have to compete with several hundred million cash-starved Chinese who will accept the equivalent of a couple of tea-bags a day to do the same job). And forget about the idea that the service sector is going to rescue us - if nobody is making anything, who can afford the services? While we're at it, let's admit that the idea that democracy follows the free market is a pipe dream (can we bring Singapore into the discussion here? Or post-Soviet "anarcho-capitalism"?). All in all, the world is probably going to be a very unpleasant place to live in the next few decades. Reading this sometimes feels like checking the map in the interval between driving off the cliff and hitting the ground; then again, you may as well know where you're going as not.

The Cost of a Reputation by Ian Mitchell, Canongate pounds 12.99. Published privately last year, and now available to the world at large, a shocking and highly readable account of the Aldington libel trial of 1989 and the events that lay behind it. In May 1945, following the German surrender, the British 5 Corps, part of the Eighth Army, was left in control of southern Carinthia - an area which, from the way it filled up with refugees from the advancing Soviet armies, was described as "the sump of Europe". There is no controversy about the basic facts of what happened next, or about the stain that it represents on Britain's war record: 71,000 refugees, including women and children, were handed over to Soviet and Yugoslav authorities, and thousands were subsequently massacred. What is in contention is how much responsibility was borne by Brigadier Low - later Lord Aldington - the Chief of Staff of 5 Corps. When Count Nikolai Tolstoy said that he had played "a decisive role" in the affair, and called him a war criminal, Lord Aldington sued for libel and was awarded record damages of pounds 1.5 million. Mitchell's case is that the trial was itself a scandal, and Government departments assisted in what was in effect a cover-up: relevant records were made available to Aldington and withheld from Tolstoy, and the judge's behaviour towards Tolstoy and his lawyers was, well, a little odd. The book tries hard to be even-handed; and while Mitchell's personal contempt for Lord Aldington seems obvious, the fact that he has attracted threats of legal action from both parties is some assurance that he's succeeded. As legal thrillers go, it beats John Grisham.

The Thieves' Opera by Lucy Moore, Penguin pounds 7.99 Moore uses the lives of Jonathan Wild, the great thief-taker, and the housebreaker Jack Sheppard as the basis for a lively survey of crime in 18th-century London, drawing on history, literature (Fielding, Defoe, Gay) and plenty of Hogarth engravings. A lot of the material will be familiar to anybody with even a cursory knowledge of the period, and at times she gets things startlingly wrong - Swift's A Modest Proposal ("A young healthy child well-nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food") is presented as an illustration of how widespread the problems of infanticide and infant mortality were, missing entirely the fact that what Swift was attacking was English policy towards Ireland. But the book is full of jolly underworld slang (priggers of prancers, wiper-pullers, spruce prigs), larger-than-life characters and shocking crimes.

Kingdom Swann by Miles Gibson, The Do Not Press pounds 6.50. Kingdom Swann is a Victorian painter with a bent for classical and Biblical scenes - The Shame of Lucretia, The Persians Feast in Babylon - who is persuaded by commercial necessity into high-class erotic photography. Gibson's witty, silly and deceptively intelligent period piece follows him through the first years of the 20th century as old age, a proto-feminist housekeeper and the law conspire to pull him down. There is a sort of philosophical debate bubbling under here, to do with the relationship between pornography and art, but mostly it is a jaunty comedy of buttocks, manners and sundry other incompatible things.

Deliver Us From Evil by Tom Holland, Warner pounds 6.99. A stunningly daft mix of vampires and Restoration literature, in which our hero, having been sodomised by the Dark Lord following a blood sacrifice at Stonehenge, seeks vengeance for his family. Along the way he runs into John Milton and Lord Rochester (who turns out to be a kind of semi-vampire himself), finds lodgings in Pudding Lane and discovers that the Undead are bearers of bubonic plague. The narrative also drags in the Golem of Prague, shamanism, leylines, and more blood-drained corpses than you can shake a stick at. What more can you want from literature?