Apart from a vague feeling that Bomber Harris might have gone too far, we don’t think much about the Allied bombing of Germany. Here, the late W G Sebald conveys the magnitude of events that claimed 600,000 civilian victims, and left a further seven and a half million homeless — while in close-up, sugar boils even in cellars, and a woman wanders round with a roasted child in a suitcase. Sebald is particularly interested in how this has been blanked out in Germany as part of its painful amnesia about the war. He was one of the really great writers and his last book has an impressive combination of finesse and gravity. PhB

(Penguin £8.99)

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORM
by Andrew Brown

The star of this book is a transparent hermaphrodite worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, which in 1998 became the first multi-cell organism to have its genome — all its DNA — listed and read. Brown has written a marvellous account of the project, which won Sydney Brenner and the team he led at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge a Nobel prize. The process was monotonous and painstaking and involved dissecting the millimetre-long worm into thousands of slices that were then photographed in an electron microscope. Brown makes the science involved accessible and lucid and it is clear that the work led directly to later success with the human genome. SB

(Pocket Books £7.99)

HEAVEN FORBID
by Christopher Hope

Five-year-old Martin Donally lives among the jacarandas of Johannesburg, but would rather be in the Sherwood Forest oaks with his hero Robin Hood. His mother is about to marry a man who is “worse than the Sheriff of Nottingham”. His sense of unease mirrors that of his family, for this is 1948 and the liberal government is about to be toppled by the architects of apartheid. Hope’s novel is a funny and affectionate portrayal of childhood and, by filtering historic events through the eyes of an uncomprehending boy, he has also found the perfect way to portray apartheid’s absurdities. IC

(Picador £7.99)

HITCHHIKER: A Biography of Douglas Adams
by M J Simpson

Adams’s great breakthrough came with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first a radio programme, then a bestselling novel. He also wrote four sequels, two Dirk Gently novels, and various other books before his death in 2001, which is not a bad output from someone who was a legendary procrastinator, although that word doesn’t really do justice to Adams’s Herculean ability to avoid doing whatever he was supposed to be doing. On several occasions he was locked in hotel rooms by frantic publishers. Simpson’s readable and balanced biography is primarily concerned with factual accuracy, sometimes to the point of pedantry, and he is not afraid to contradict Adams’s own myths about his life. SG

(Coronet £8.99)

A MARRIED WOMAN
by Manju Kapur

“Astha was brought up properly, as befits a woman, with large supplements of fear.” So opens Kapur’s compelling novel, from which emerges the image of an India hidebound by patriarchal traditions yet galvanised by the economic prosperity of the late 20th century. Woven into this social backcloth is Astha’s attempt to unlock the manacles of a prosaic marriage through an affair with an actor’s widow. As she comes to realise that love — like duty, material comfort and liberty — has its limits, Kapur’s book blossoms into a sensitive reflection on selfhood and the imprecise meaning of happiness. TL

(Faber £7.99)

THE COMMISSARIAT OF ENLIGHTENMENT
by Ken Kalfus

As Tolstoy expires in 1910 he falls prey to a parade of chancers, vultures, visionaries and revolutionaries. Aside from the scientist with macabre embalming methods and the journalist out to commercialise the writer’s image, there is also Gribshin, a film-maker happy to let his camera warp the truth to pull off a newsreel coup. It is no surprise that Stalin, another deathbed pilgrim, sees the vast propagandist possibilities of the new era solidify in the young director. Kalfus rarely gets under his characters’ skins, but this is an absorbing tale of media mendacity and manipulation. TL

(Scribner £6.99)

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