SEMIDETACHED by Griff Rhys Jones

How do you write a memoir of an unexceptional upbringing in suburbia without making it dull? One method is to present the past as a comically foreign country where people do things differently. Rhys Jones is good at retelling his childhood and adolescence as a sequence of funny sketches involving uncomprehending parents, eccentric teachers and social embarrassments with girls. More surprising, perhaps, is the poignant precision with which he reconstructs a strangely remote, almost Victorian life in the 1960s and 1970s on the anonymous borderlands where London meets Essex. This is an unexpectedly touching evocation of the ordinary pains and pleasures of growing up in middle England (Penguin £7.99). NR

SEVEN LIES by James Lasdun

When Stefan Vogel has a glass of red wine thrown in his face at a New York party it shocks him into recalling his past in the former East Germany. There, his mother’s belief that he is a poet-intellectual takes such a deep root that he comes to embody the role, despite never having written an original word — the first of many lies that return to haunt him. Lasdun creates a brilliant post-cold-war novel in which the protagonists still live in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and their past decisions, made through fear, greed, or, in Stefan’s case, a sense of fatefulness (Vintage £7.99). IC

NOMAD’S HOTEL: Travels in Time and Space by Cees Nooteboom

“The origin of existence is movement,” writes Nooteboom, quoting a 12th-century Arabian philosopher, and he himself has spent most of his life wandering the earth, from Gambia and Mali to the wave-lashed rocks of western Ireland. Yet the dispatches he sends back, collected in this quirky and immensely entertaining book, are not the usual travelogue fare: he seeks silence and solitude rather than strange encounters. As a novelist, he wants above all a place to write, to see the world filtered through words. At one point, he meets an American Peace Corps worker, who “resembles the beginning of a novel which is destined to have an unhappy ending” (Vintage £7.99). IC

NOTTING HELL by Rachel Johnson

In this lightly comical novel, highly competitive friends Mimi and Clare enjoy one of west London’s most covetable postcodes and the aspirational lifestyle that goes with it. These status-conscious Notting Hill wives not only crave attention from the neighbourhood’s newest hunky billionaire, but also yearn for a six-figure salary (Mimi) and an accessory It-baby (would-be yummy mummy Clare). There are plenty of wicked one-liners in this read from the author of The Mummy Diaries, and it flies by fast enough to ensure that the superficiality of the characters doesn’t completely exhaust your patience (Penguin £6.99). EU

THE LOST BABES: Manchester United and the Forgotten Victims of Munich by Jeff Connor

The plane crash that robbed English football of Matt Busby’s glittering young Manchester United team in 1958 is still raw for many survivors and their families. The story of the team’s development into the great entertainers of the game is familiar, but Connor retreads it well. Most unsettling, however, is the disenchantment of those who lived on. Much of the bitterness is directed at the late Busby, for broken financial promises and personal snubs, as if the manager had tried to exorcise his own ghosts by purging the living memories of that day from his club. There is poignancy, too: David Pegg’s sister visits his grave fortnightly, and each time finds a single red flower left by an unknown fellow mourner (HarperSport £7.99). ML

HOW TO SURVIVE YOUR MOTHER by Jonathan Maitland

Opening with his mother’s deathbed scene (a fraudulent enactment inflicted on her 12-year-old son), Maitland’s memoir reveals an absurdly histrionic and truly outrageous woman. When she wasn’t pretending to die of cancer or deliberately crashing her car, she was, unforgivably, swindling the elderly out of their savings at the sub-standard old people’s home she ran. Ironically, young Maitland grew up to present a television programme exposing fraudsters, and he brings a tough TV-style bounce to this book. Lightly told and played for laughs, it is a investigation of a grasping sociopath who was actually far from funny, as Maitland realises by the end (Pocket Books £7.99). PhB

THE GOOD LIFE by Jay McInerney

Once a gilded yuppie, Corrine Calloway has seen even more of the lustre fade from her marriage to her inconstant husband since they appeared in McInerney’s Brightness Falls (1992). Her disenchantment is shared by former banker Luke McGavock, whose high earnings cannot buy the loyalty of his materialistic wife or stop his daughter self-destructing. Corrine and Luke’s domestic fault lines are widened by the shock waves of 9/11, which throw them into each other’s arms when helping at a soup kitchen near Ground Zero. That style still has the upper hand over substance in McInerney’s fiction partly explains why his interminably namechecking characters are much less in tune with their emotions than they are with the designer labels in their wardrobes (Bloomsbury £7.99). TL

BLUE SHOES AND HAPPINESS by Alexander McCall Smith

In the seventh volume of McCall Smith’s series, Mme Ramotswe is still running the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana. Aside from the usual problems she is asked to solve (thieving cooks, dishonest doctors, mystery blackmailers), other tricky issues arise: how to convince her assistant’s fiancée that feminism isn’t scary; whether to buy a fancy pair of blue shoes; should “traditionally built” women like herself give up cake? The author Smith adds touches of melancholy to the gentle comedy. Mme Ramotswe thinks about her dead father and child, and the plight of Aids orphans is alluded to. But nothing spoils his vision of Botswana as a place where decent people triumph over mischief-makers (Abacus £6.99). SR

12 BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: How Words and Wisdom Have Shaped Our Lives by Melvyn Bragg

This diverting television series is muddled and insubstantial in book form. Significant social and intellectual shifts — antislavery, evolution, women’s rights — are pegged to books that effected, affected or typified them, but there is little sense of causation and some of the choices seem extremely flimsy when given this much space. The factory system, for example, did not need Arkwright’s patent for a spinning machine. And then, bizarrely, Bragg apologises for including Shakespeare, whose influence cannot be proved “unambiguously”. Who else could have written Hamlet? This reads like some stuff Bragg thought of, in the order that he thought of it (Sceptre £8.99). RH

All titles available at Sunday Times Books First prices (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist