Whatever Love Means
David Baddiel
Abacus £6.99, pp310
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It all stopped being funny when every last comic tried to cash in and turn to writing, which is perhaps why the more astute social commentators (and Baddiel is easily the equal of Sean Hughes) have turned to darker matters. For Baddiel, it was the death of Diana that instigated a new era of seriousness. Vic and Emma's affair began the same day and its consequences occasion a meditation on the durability, indeed the very existence, of romance. Baddiel's style is superficially sillier than life, but ultimately sadder. The biggest questions - Can we cure Aids? Who killed Diana? - allude to our triviality and the scale of our tragedies. Such is the web-like intricacy of the plot that it is almost ephemeral until you're caught in it, grimly enthralled.
A Good Place to Die
James Buchan
Harvill £6.99, pp343
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While every other book nowadays is described loosely as an 'odyssey' of some kind, A Good Place to Die attempts to rewrite the Iliad, Odyssey and the Aeneid, setting them further east and couching them in the style of an anglicised Omar Khayyam. John Pitt, a naive English teacher, is separated from his wife during Iran's revolution, and after a decade of torture and incarceration, enlists to fight for his adopted country in the turbulent Eighties.
Orphaned and perennially exiled, but never believing himself a widower, he rejects hippie hedonism for the strictures of Islam, finally surrendering to the Divine Will when he walks into a minefield to rescue a peasant girl. Eventually, of course, Pitt finds his Penelope and his Latium - his new spiritual homeland - after Iran has been all but sacked, yet Buchan has the talent to maintain tension to the last.
My Movie Business
John Irving
Black Swan £6.99, pp158
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Few writers have seen their work translated from paper to celluloid as successfully as John Irving. The bulk of this memoir is a re-telling of the (production of the) Oscar-winning The Cider House Rules, but there is also a minute history of America's policy on abortion. As it happens, Irving's grandfather, a great surgeon immortalised for his authorship of a ribald drinking song, was his literary inspiration, for his ability to inject humour into the most unlikely subjects. My Movie Business touches on the relationships between biography and fiction, form and content, humour and horror, literature and film. Although this is too slight to appeal to non-completists, it's a worthy addition to the oeuvre. Now that he's a full-time writer, at the peak of his powers, Irving's next real novel should be spectacular.
La Grande Thérèse
Hilary Spurling
Profile Books £5.99, pp134
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Spurling's last three biographies have been so highly lauded, it's strange to find her fourth so skeletal. Short on analysis and short of breath, the extravagance of Thérèse Humbert is unfortunately not matched by the style of her life story. La Grande Thérèse had the audacity to borrow the millions needed to purchase a chateau she never lived in, because it never occurred to anyone that they wouldn't be reimbursed.
That wasn't her greatest coup, though; it was more like a publicity stunt to launch her career as a swindler. Imaginary suitor, an imaginary inheritance and an oversized strongbox were all part of the ploy. This bodes well for the story's TV adaptation, but its present form is frustrating in its brevity and disengagement.
On the Move: Feminism for a New Generation
edited by Natasha Walter
Virago £7.99, pp186
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'Unless we create a new kind of sisterhood... we are in danger of [concluding] that middle-class women have the luxury... of deciding that the movement has had its day.' Although a sizeable but unsatisfactory proportion of (mostly Western) women have parity with men, they account for only three per cent of women worldwide.
The cynical view would be that feminism enabled women to be exploited on male terms, and yet the writers here never quite discredit such a view. Feminism, it seems, has lost the thrill of discovery, the momentum of revolution, and the overriding tone of this accessible, varied and articulate collection verges on pessimism. The incontestable essays by teenagers prove how glaringly obvious the continuing inequality is. There is no more required reading, just action.
• Michael Mellor
Gore Vidal
Fred Kaplan
Bloomsbury £8.99, pp850
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Fred Kaplan has previously produced biographies of Dickens, Henry James and Thomas Carlyle, and includes in this expansive and fascinating book a story about standing with his present subject in a graveyard and explaining how he usually prefers his writers dead. Gore Vidal responds by soliciting Kaplan's opinion on the design of his future headstone, an irony the biographer relishes. The closeness between writer and subject is apparent throughout the book and the wealth of detail is remarkable; Kaplan's style is engaging but never flamboyant, and it is Vidal's striking and controversial personality that charges the writing.
• Jane Perry
