The Beach House by Jane Green
Michael Joseph, £16.99 Buy the book here

This belongs in the enjoyable subdivision of chick-lit known as House Porn. The heroine is a sparkling widow named Nan, but the real star is a great big, sexy beach house in deliciously unattainable Nantucket. Nan has inherited the house from her husband's family, but has fallen on hard times. Instead of selling the place, she takes in lodgers (divorced dad, single mum, troubled teen, etc.) and they become her extended family, healing their fractured lives, finding themselves and all that jazz. Green is awesomely prolific, and her tenth novel has all her trademark warmth, humour and wish-fulfilment.

The Rat-killer by Alexander Terekhov, trans. Natalie Roy and B.T. Gall
Arrow £7.99, Buy the book here

Terekhov wrote the first version of this satirical novel about post-Soviet Russia in 1997. He rewrote it in 2002, presumably because real-life events overtook the satire, and he needed to amp it up. The town of Svetloyar is trying to get itself on the tourist map. Unfortunately it has two big problems. First, as one of Stalin's hideous new towns, it has no history. Secondly like Hamelin it is overrun with rats. Two pest controllers are summoned from Moscow, and the narrator is one of these modern Pied Pipers. Increasingly, we notice that the behaviour of the people around him is starting to resemble that of the rodents. Funny, crazy and wonderfully unpredictable.

The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt
Harvill Secker, £12.99 Buy the book here

It's a bit about isolation, a bit about the history of New York, a bit about the scientist Nikola Tesla. There is far too much material, and it has been worked half to death. Hunt also tries to be winsome and the overall effect is of a lumbering stegosaurus trying to look coy. On the cover, Dave Eggers assures us it is “completely original”, but everything from the tiresomely irrelevant title to the pretentious notes at the back reminds one of Eggers himself.

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