Is it Middlemarch, War and Peace or a pair of skiing trousers? Our paperback guru Nicholas Lezard didn't greet Jonathan Franzen's Freedom with quite the unalloyed cheer it received on first publication, but he still found in it – as well as a shopping list for the Great American Novel – "wise, expansive, knowing" entertainment.
One of the most urgent and important novels of 2010 comes out in paperback this month – David Grossman's To the End of the Land, the story of a Jewish mother who feels she has lost her son to the army and anti-Palestinian nationalism. She embarks on an odyssey from Jerusalem to Gallilee, seeking to outrun the military "notifiers" who could knock on her door at any moment with news of his death. Jacqueline Rose called it "without question one of the most powerful and moving novels I have read"; "a novel that recounts like no other I have read the lengths to which a mother will go to preserve the life of her child".
More psychological and geographical journeys in Will Self's Walking to Hollywood, a blend of fiction and memoir in which, as M John Harrison put it, "almost everyone is played by, or plays, someone else". It takes in conceptual art in north London, a hallucinatory Los Angeles, and the disappearing shoreline of the Yorkshire coast.
The Booker-shortlisted Snowdrops by AD Miller exposes a fascinating world: corrupt, cash-rich Moscow, with sharp practice around every corner. A "snowdrop" is a snow-buried corpse revealed in the spring thaw; expat lawyer Nicholas, the morally weak (anti)hero, only sees the scam he's caught up in when it's too late. Our review considered it "both a very good novel and a slightly disappointing one", written with tremendous energy but also a certain amount of stereotyping.
One not to miss is the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann's Fame: A Novel in Nine Episodes, a series of comic skits on the opportunities new technology gives us to play around with our identities; it was described by Jonathan Franzen as "a real beauty of a book, farcical, satiric, melancholic, and humane". Meanwhile there's comedy of later life from Armistead Maupin, whose Mary Ann in Autumn is the eighth in his San Francisco-set Tales of the City series, now running for nearly 40 years. Vital to the early books' appeal, said our reviewer, was Maupin's "genial observation of a hedonistic paradise related in an approachable style that made depravity seem curiously wholesome": this new volume may be darker and tinged with loss, but style-wise the author has "got his mojo back" and is "back to his rapturous best".
"The big difference between 'conflict diamonds' and 'conflict oil' is that one is a luxury and the other a necessity, which means the international community turns a blind eye," wrote our reviewer of Helon Habila's Oil on Water. Habila's third novel highlights the environmental and human rights abuses of oil drilling in Nigeria, painting a grim but compelling picture of the "fetid, viscous, menacing landscape".
Jennifer Egan's success with A Visit from the Goon Squad has prompted Corsair to repackage her second novel, 2001's Look At Me, about a New York model who becomes unrecognisable after a car crash and engages in desperate behaviour, online and off, in a bid to reestablish her identity. The New York Times called it an "opaque, surreal tale of maladjustment". Reaching further back, the fantastic Faber Finds - "The Place for Lost Books" - has rescued Sylvia Townsend Warner's 1966 sharp story collection A Stranger With a Bag and Other Stories. The author of Lolly Willowes is now, as Sarah Waters says, "shamefully under-read"; this edition might help to correct that.
• That's a selection of our paperback reviews: don't forget to add your own.
