Most rock stars think that they can write books, easy. They can’t. It’s a far more complex and taxing discipline than knocking off a few rhyming couplets against a catchy melody. Mark Everett of Eels is the exception. His memoir, now in paperback, is a portal — as all good books are — into a brilliantly drawn other world of strange folk doing strange things in grim pursuit of normality.

Within the first few pages he tells us that he will not be indulging in any “flowery s***”. Thereafter, much the same as in his songs, he deadpans us through the deaths and disappointments that encircle his car-crash family, which is high on IQ but perilously low on life skills. While other dads played sport with their sons or hosted barbecues, Everett’s — a quantum mechanic, no less — “sat there”. The book is punctuated with these pithy, often humorous, gems that serve to smooth over the story’s serrated edges.

Everett’s life has not been without its good fortune, though these episodes are related in a more elliptical fashion. He dates a string of beautiful girls at school, for example, and regardless of his supposed shyness he manages to find the confidence to play drums in front of his classmates and then graduate to singing. More crucially, after only a few years of slog, he finds a patron in the music business who acts as a catalyst to a career that endures today.

As one would expect of anyone reaching a certain amount of fame, Everett is in possession of sufficient self-love to hold him aloft from the crowd. Much of the pleasure of his narrative is observing how he has reconciled this with his assumed outsider’s stance and the awkward reticence of his background.

Despite his best efforts, his ego leaks occasionally but so does the hope, love and the passion — more usually for the creative process itself: making records, speaking your mind. And this is what Everett does best, whether in song or written down like this. You’re sitting on the back porch with him and he sets off, talking like his dad never could, drawing out the best stories, telling it straight, and him knowing that there is a beauty in this simplicity.

Things the Grandchildren Should Know by Mark Everett Abacus, £7.99; Buy this book; 246pp

Also out in paperback

In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor edited by Charlotte Mosley (John Murray, £8.99: Buy this book;) Decades of platonic love letters between the last Mitford sister and the scholarly soldier Paddy Fermor are highly engaging exchanges of mutual joie de vivre.

The Black Death: An Intimate History by John Hatcher (Phoenix, £8.99; Buy this book) A little Suffolk village is the prism through which Hatcher explores the impact of one of the world’s deadliest pandemics.

We Danced all Night: Britain Between the Wars by Martin Pugh (Vintage, £8.99; Buy this book) Pugh rejects the dreary depictions of the Twenties and Thirties in his rewriting of interwar Britain as a stable, progressive period of bubbling optimism.

Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin (Penguin, £8.99; Buy this book) Deakin’s gentle and joyful observations of life on his Suffolk farm reveal a truly lyrical conservationist.

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