THE DISCOMFORT ZONE by Jonathan Franzen

Franzen’s parents used to argue over the thermostat: his father wanted it to be in the area labelled “comfort zone”, while his mother liked the house cold. Young Jonathan lived in the “discomfort zone”, a world full of self-doubts, agonies and embarrassments. While some of his anecdotes about a childhood in the Midwest are standard coming-of-age fare, others are more surprising — his sense of the erotic discovered through the German language, for instance. Alongside his hilarious tales of adolescent humiliations there is also a fascinating account of how he first became aware that he could be a writer.

(Harper Perennial £8.99). IC

LIBERTY: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore

In 1789, Frenchmen demanded equal rights. This struggle became women’s, too, and Moore shows that there was a powerful sororité behind the famed fraternité of revolutionary France. These women range from the bawdy fishwives to the elegant salonnières (or hostesses), some of whom wore brooches made out of shards from the fallen Bastille. Moore does not flatter any of these women, admitting of Thérésia de Fontenay, for example, that “the only thing she enjoyed more than pleasure was attention”. She does, however, grant them their rightful place in history. Moore’s study is deeply researched, but light of touch and rich with quotations such as Madame de Staël’s description of her husband: “of all the men I could never love . . . the one I like best”.

(Harper Perennial £8.99). ESB

BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN by Haruki Murakami

These bewitching stories take us into an imaginative wonderland in which nothing is as ordinary or, indeed, as surreal as it first seems. Written over three decades, the tales reflect both the Japanese author’s artistic evolution and western cultural influences. Not that Edward Lear would recognise the brain-munching felines in the tale Man-Eating Cats, or Aesop the cookie-eating crows in The Rise and Fall of Sharpie Cakes, a scabrously funny satire on Japan’s literary elite. Murakami can strive too hard for otherness, as in the vignette about a writer who acquires a phantom aunt on his back, but the fable concerning a woman’s love for an ice man is an elegiac study of a heart in winter. This is a wise, strange and ethereally beautiful collection.

(Vintage £7.99). TL

HEAT by Bill Buford

Buford, a writer on The New Yorker, relates how an assignment for the magazine led him to a six-month stint as a kitchen slave to an impossibly colourful celebrity chef, an apprenticeship to an impossibly colourful celebrity butcher in the Tuscan hills and an obsession with Italian food. It is easy to say that Buford’s paean to the small, the local and the traditional is fetishistic, but that would be to miss the point. Like a climber explaining the eternal appeal of Everest, the author has taken a journey into a place that few of us can afford to go, and like other travellers, he tells us something about what it is to be human.

(Vintage £8.99). RH

THE MAN WHO WENT INTO THE WEST: The Life of RS Thomas by Byron Rogers

Given that Thomas, the Welsh poet-vicar, wrote four autobiographies, it might have been thought a biography was unnecessary. However, as Rogers points out, the memoirs don’t give much away. In one, for instance, Thomas mentions getting married, but neglects to give his wife’s name. Rogers has little other material to work with: the reclusive (some say misanthropic) Thomas left no diaries, no photographs and hardly any letters, but the lack of material here works in Rogers’s favour. The book becomes more a personal search for the truth about its complex subject than a conventional biography. Using testimony from Thomas’s family and acquaintances, Rogers creates a brilliantly original and often surprisingly funny work.

(Aurum £8.99). IC

BIG BABIES: OR: Why Can’t We Just Grow Up by Michael Bywater

Why do packets of peanuts now carry warnings that they might contain nuts? Bywater probes the creeping idiocy of contemporary life and rolls up several phenomena (dumbing down, Americanisation, the rise of lawyers, the endlessness of marketing) within his snappy catch-all argument about infantilisation. We’re not seen as intelligent responsible adults any more, and the result is a culture where disaffected McDonald’s employees wear shirts that say “I’m lovin’ it” (when, as Bywater says, nobody could be expected to love it, and there is also a “g” on the end of loving) and the government appoints something called a “respect czar”. Like a message from the last sane man on earth, Bywater’s rant ought to be depressing, but it’s so funny the effect is exhilarating.

(Granta £7.99). PhB

GHOST HUNTERS by Deborah Blum

Victorian Britain is often perceived as the period when the basic principles of conservative religion were increasingly exposed by the new Darwinian theory. Blum, a prominent science journalist, explores a different attack on Christian doctrine: the fervent belief in the paranormal. As increasing numbers of people reported communication with the dead, seances became a fashionable pastime and the word “poltergeist” entered the language. The tales here are sometimes ludicrous, sometimes curiously persuasive, but Blum treats these mysteries at the edge of life with a healthy balance of respect and scepticism.

(Arrow £8.99). ES-B

THE ACT OF ROGER MURGATROYD by Gilbert Adair

The decade is the 1930s, and, in an isolated English country house, murder most foul has been committed. Raymond Gentry, a poisonously indiscreet gossip columnist, lies dead in a locked attic room, and all the other guests at a Christmas party, from the bestselling mystery writer Evadne Mount to Cora Rutherford, a flamboyant actress, have reasons for rejoicing in Gentry’s exit from the world. Chief Inspector Trubshawe, late of Scotland Yard, must decide whose motive was strong enough for murder. Parody seldom works at book length, but Adair’s affectionate pastiche of the classic crime fiction that was practised by the likes of Agatha Christie sustains our interest by providing a mystery as intriguing as those in the best of the stories he is spoofing.

(Faber £7.99). NR

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