When Skateboards will be Free: My Reluctant Political Childhood by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Hamish Hamilton, £14.99; Buy this book; 288pp Everyone will have a skateboard and skateboards will be free when the socialist revolution succeeds in the US. So said the author’s mother. Until then they cost $10.99 in Pittsburgh. In 1979 the author’s father stood as a socialist candidate for the Presidency of Iran as the country was about to fall to the ayatollahs. With love and sympathy for his parents, who lived by their principles at the cost of comfort and security, the author tells his coming-of-age story with a witty awareness of personal and political contradictions and a touching regard for a childhood materially deprived but rich in love.

Detour de France: An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education by Michael Simkins Ebury, £10.99; Buy this book; 310pp It doesn’t take much to make Stephen Fry laugh, to judge by his cover line, “trouser-wipingly funny”, hyping this mildly amusing tale of an English actor’s attempts to rub himself against the surface of French social and cultural life in the faint hope that he may acquire a veneer of sophistication. But the last thing Simkins wants to do is go native — he wants to play boules, take a look at Lourdes, hang out with English expats and be ruefully self-deprecating so that he can return home from his holiday unchanged and write a trouser-wiping book about how to misunderstand the French without really trying.

The Case for God: What Religion Really Means by Karen Armstrong The Bodley Head, £20; Buy this book; 376pp Armstrong’s argument goes far beyond the broadsides from the atheistic trinity of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins and Sam Harris, who, she says, focus too narrowly against the God developed by fundamentalism, which “is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith”. First she has to define what is meant by “God” and then proceed to discuss that definition. But the very nature of God as we conceive it can lead us into error: Armstrong prefers practice over doctrine, myth and poetry over sacred texts, meditation over ritual. Above all, she says that religion is not a soft option: it is hard work; it is a practical discipline.

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