Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science by Mary Roach
Canongate, £12.99 Buy the book here

When Mary Roach is seized by a subject, there's no stopping her: she is full-on, hands-on, and her lab coat is unbuttoned. She is not slow to formulate questions that even Woody Allen would be afraid to ask: does erectile function continue after death (do stiffs get stiff)? Sexual physiologists, and Roach, want to know. Sexology is still a curiously hole-and-corner affair, underfunded and not much loved by serious-minded researchers. Sexologists tend to be pretty much, uh, bonkers, like the enthusiastic Dr Hsu, who devotes himself to improving penis performance. Sex is evidently not all in the mind.

Halfway to Venus: A One-Armed Journey by Sarah Anderson
Umbrella Books, £12.99 Buy the book here

When she was ten years old, Sarah Anderson lost her left arm to a rare form of cancer. She might have lost her life, but instead she gained a career very different to her first expectations. She founded The Travel Bookshop and has lived a full, energetic life. Her courageous acceptance of loss, her refusal to perceive of herself as a victim, and her perceptive understanding of her own and other people's fear of “difference” is movingly and candidly analysed in terms of her own experience and an intelligent wider reference to art and literature.

Pilgrim State by Jaqueline Walker
Sceptre, £14.99 Buy the book here

“Misery memoir” is a pejorative term that, too broadly applied, may underestimate some fine, honest writing and acute personal insight. This is a daughter's narrative of the life of her mother, Dorothy Walker, who struggled continuously with mental illness while raising her children in Harlem, Jamaica and, finally, London in the early 1960s, when the family struggled to overcome prejudice, poverty and loss of their roots. Jacqueline Walker has written this fond, striking memoir as homage to a brave, beautiful woman.

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