MILLENNIUM PEOPLE
By J. G. Ballard
Harper Perennial, £7.99
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Similarly to Cocaine and Super-Cannes, Millennium People takes as its basis another upmarket housing estate in crisis. But whereas the communities in those first two novels turned to sadism and debauchery as relief from the daily grind, the middle class of Chelsea Marina adopt the guerrilla tactics of revolutionaries way down the payscale. But this genteel revolt is merely a parlour game suggested and then tired of by the enigmatic paediatrician Richard Gould. As the psychologist David Markham discovers, Gould is embarked on a project to violently enshrine meaninglesness. It is here that the faint ridiculousness of Ballard’s plot entwines with a more provocative strand: the modern anxiety of random terrorist atrocities.

JESUS’ SON
By Denis Johnson
Methuen, £7.99
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The autobiographical stories of drug addiction and drifting in Jesus’ Son, first published in 1992, were originally written as a way of getting the IRS off the author’s back. While the lives explored here are chaotic, however, the writing is anything but; rather it is electric, funny and subtly redemptive.

ANTWERP
By Nicholas Royle
Serpent’s Tail, £10
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Royle’s latest begins clunkily, but once the plot begins to whir Antwerp becomes a satisfyingly atmospheric thriller. Having a film critic for a hero requires that Royle’s killers be au fait with obscure European cinema, and there is one coincidence too many, but the conceits matter less and less as the grisliness grows.

BRICKS AND MORTAR
By Helen Ashton
Persephone, £10
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The republication of Ashton’s sedate 1932 novel won’t set the world alight, but the story of architect Martin Lovell and his malfunctioning marriage is affecting, and all the more appealing for Ashton’s irony and wit. The novel, beginning in 1892 and ending in 1931, offers a fascinating portrait of shifts within the class system.

TRUECRIME
By Jake Arnott
Sceptre, £6.99
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Truecrime takes a running jump at 1995, Arnott whipping through the previous 20 years of cor-blimey criminality while sticking the satirical knife into Guy Ritchie, James Palumbo and numerous other soft targets along the way. It’s about as deep as a puddle, but offers harmless violent fun.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

BLAIR’S WARS
By John Kampfner
Free Press, £7.99
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This updated edition of a famously ferocious book reinforces the thesis that the five wars of intervention fought by Britain since Blair came to power have all been at the behest of the PM. Kampfner emphasises Blair’s messianic moral fervour and his Manichean view of a world divided into “good guys” and “bad guys”. Blair’s public comrades-in-arms stance with the US has persisted despite snubs by contemptuous neocons who have often kept him sidelined and ill-informed. Blair is presented as bestriding the world as a proselytising statesman who carries the true revealed view of America. The job of maintaining a posture of solidarity with the US becomes, too often, a game of catch-up in the dark when assumptions are deliberately dressed up as facts, and hanging on to Uncle Sam’s coat-tails when unilateral decisions are taken by the Pentagon and the White House with scant (if any) reference to No 10.

THE CENTRE OF THE BED
By Joan Bakewell
Sceptre, £7.99
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The centre of the bed is where, divorced or widowed or single, you sleep alone. Bakewell’s nuits blanches, now that the lovers have gone, the children have grown, and the domestic and professional clutter has been put away, now that she is 70, are a time for reflection on a gilded life in the pop and media culture that gave her celebrity. Her autobiography is wise and wry.

SHOOT OUT
By Peter Bart and Peter Guber
Faber, £8.99
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Veterans of the Hollywood combat zone who get out alive from its hellzapoppin’ hype and humungous humbug tend to emerge dazed. Bart and Guber, as studio and indie producers, kept notes. Their report on the politics and paranoia that (mis)inform the industry is jaw-dropping in its awful anecdote and its analysis of the awesome incompetence of the industry.

STASILAND
By Anna Funder
Granta, £7.99
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These “Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall” about lives repressed by the East German Stasi this week won the BBC Four Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. I began her sprightly prose prepared for an indictment of the horrors of a victimised society, and finished laughing along with the frank-speaking characters Funder found. Wit survives and inhumanity is often undermined by its ironies.

MONTURIOL’S DREAM
By Matthew Stewart
Profile, £8.99
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In Barcelona’s harbour there is a full-scale model of the Ictineo II submarine. Its creator and Stewart’s hero is Narcís Monturiol i Estarriol, a 19th-century engineer and inventor. His inspiration was a desire to save the precarious lives of local coral divers. He also envisaged underwater farms and cities. This good-natured biography of a visionary genius is heartening and heartbreaking.

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