Working On My Novel by Cory Arcangel (Penguin, £5.99)
Working On My Novel by Cory Arcangel (Penguin, £5.99)
The concept behind American artist Arcangel's book - that the world is full of people "working on their novels" while doing other things - may raise a few knowing titters. But surely the real laugh here is on the book-buying public, when this thin selection of 128 real-life tweets, at the rate of one per page, is priced at £5.99.
Chaplin And Company by Mave Fellowes (Vintage, £8.99)
One can forgive the occasional cliché in this debut novel, where the newly orphaned Odeline Milk talks to herself in a mirror as so many young heroines are wont to do, for the care given to the rest of this story. Odeline's father was a circus clown and she heads for London to continue the tradition.
The Ancient Paths by Graham Robb (Picador, £8.99)
Robb's discovery in Oxford of roads once aligned by the movement of the sun and the stars during the "pre-history" era of the Bronze and Iron ages prompted this book and his cycling journey along a route, the Via Heraklea, which many believed never existed. A passionate, immensely informative and exciting history.
Noon Tide Toll by Romesh Gunesekera (Granta, £12.99)
It's one of the trickiest acts to pull off, the turning of political comment or observation into a believable, character-driven novel, but Gunesekera manages it beautifully, without making his central character, the Sri Lankan-based van driver Vasantha, simply a mouthpiece for the effects of war on a landscape and the people who inhabit it.
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