MATTERS OF LIFE & DEATH by Bernard MacLaverty

The title of MacLaverty’s collection of tales could be a thematic touchstone for his fiction in general, which is studded with subtle juxtapositions of existence and mortality. One of the most memorable vignettes here is the gently reflective The Clinic, where a copy of Chekhov’s stories acquires a talismanic quality for a man awaiting medical tests. Elsewhere, On the Roundabout and Up the Coast deal with savage acts of violence (the former about a Good Samaritan who saves the victim of a sectarian beating, the latter featuring a rape that has fatal repercussions for the perpetrator), but the author’s skilful nuances of tone produce startling different effects. If you find another volume of stories this year as good as MacLaverty’s, you will have been doubly blessed.

(Vintage £7.99). TL

BAREFOOT SOLDIER by Johnson Beharry VC with Nick Cook

Twice in 2004, 24-year-old Johnson Beharry drove his Warrior armoured vehicle through enemy fire in Iraq. The first time, he pulled wounded colleagues from the burning vehicle, saving their lives while bullets landed around him. The second time, he continued driving after a grenade exploded a foot from his face and caused him appalling head wounds. For these Beharry won the Victoria Cross — the first living person awarded it for 40 years. This fascinating autobiography includes some superb battle descriptions, such as the horror of watching a young child launch a rocket-propelled grenade and seeing it get nearer and nearer.

(Sphere £6.99). SB

A LITTLE STRANGER by Kate Pullinger

What possesses a young woman such as Fran to desert her adorable baby son Louis, leave husband Nick minding the shop (or in his case, a restaurant) and jet off to Las Vegas with her life hastily crammed into her hand luggage like an unravelling sweater? These questions are sympathetically addressed by Pullinger’s novel, in which the heroine’s search for her alcoholic mother reveals insecurities about her own maternal shortcomings, sense of marital disenchantment and filial abandonment. A fortuitous encounter with divorced gambler Leslie, who still mourns the loss of her only daughter, provides Fran with the emotional moorings she needs before she embarks on the final stage of her odyssey and brings this unassuming yet affecting book to a satisfying conclusion.

(Serpent’s Tail £7.99). TL

THE YEAR OF HENRY JAMES: The Story of a Novel by David Lodge

In 2004, Lodge published a novel about Henry James — Author, Author — in a year that saw a clutch of novels on the same subject. Whether it was the zeitgeist or just a coincidence, it was bad luck for Lodge, whose own book was outpaced and generally outgunned by Colm Toibin’s James novel The Master. Ironically, Lodge’s book featured the flopping of James’s Guy Domville against the success of George Du Maurier’s Trilby, and in 2004 he found himself playing James to Toibin’s Du Maurier. Narrated without rancour, though he recalls sly and slimy behaviour from one or two people in the book industry, The Year of Henry James is an authentic report on the modern literary marketplace.

(Penguin £9.99). PB

NEVER THE BRIDE by Paul Magrs

Brenda runs a B&B in Whitby. She loves the “doom-laden, chintzy” atmosphere and normality, attending to guests and treating herself to afternoon tea with her friend Effie. But strange things start happening in Whitby (Dracula’s drop-off point, let’s not forget). Why do the women who attend the Deadly Boutique emerge 20 years younger, and who is the dashing new man in town who dislikes the daylight? As Brenda and Effie investigate, mysteries about their own identities materialise. Magrs delightfully combines gothic melodrama and the mundane, describing pensioners’ bingo nights with as much verve as the third eye of one of Brenda’s guests. Never the Bride is unusual, touching and engrossing, with just the right amount of humour about its own gothic-ness.

(Headline Review £7.99). ES-B

THE BEATLES: The Biography by Bob Spitz

How badly does the world need a new book on the Beatles? The story of the Fab Four, from Liverpudlian teenage years through sleazy sex and drugs and rock’n’roll in Hamburg to global superstardom and the group’s inevitable implosion at the end of the 1960s, is familiar from dozens of tellings. Spitz is not the most elegant writer to have tackled the saga (witness for example, his bizarre description of Cynthia Lennon’s meeting with her future husband, who “had sparked a chemistry of unrest within her body that was outside the boundaries of respect”, whatever that might mean), but he may well be the most thorough and his enormous book is essential reading for moptop fans everywhere.

(Aurum £12.99). NR

PELAGIA AND THE WHITE BULLDOG by Boris Akunin

In a remote Russian province at the end of the 19th century, modernity intrudes in the shape of a ruthless government officer from St Petersburg, come to disturb the quiet tenor of traditional life. On a ramshackle family estate where Chekhovian characters idle away their days, the owner’s prized white bulldogs are found dead. The two events are mysteriously connected and only the gauche but resourceful nun, Sister Pelagia, dispatched by the local bishop to investigate, can work out how. The first of Akunin’s Sister Pelagia mysteries is a gloriously original crime story. Its historical setting is convincingly evoked and its protagonist, at once naive and immensely shrewd, is even more engaging than Erast Fandorin, the hero of Akunin’s earlier novels.

(Phoenix £6.99). NR

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