English Passengers
Matthew Kneale
(Penguin, £6.99)
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Setting a ship of fools on course for a Victorian paradise, Kneale subverts the swashbuckler and expedition-journal forms in a novel that tells its story through high comedy, but has serious intent. The Sincerity is a smuggling vessel, captained by Manxman Illiam Quillian Kewley, until, seized by British Customs, it becomes the Charity and is chartered to Tasmania by the Rev Wilson, who aims to refute Darwinism. Kneale slips between journey - where Wilson battles with the eugenicist Dr Potter - and destination, where Tasmanians fight desperately against the "ghost" men. Savage fun mixed with a sobering history lesson makes for an entertaining moral adventure.
Caesar
Patrick O'Brian
(HarperCollins, £5.99)
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O'Brian completists will undoubtedly buy this before noticing that there is not a whiff of sea salt within. More famous for his Napoleonic naval tales, he wrote this 100-page adventure as a teenager. His first bestseller is the touchingly naive biography of a panda-leopard hybrid (a big spotty cat with panda eyes on the cover) who owes much to Kipling's unsentimental anthropomorphism. Caesar's vocabulary - he knows a family of pigs is properly called a sounder - and the quick revivals of a flagging narrative with an eclipse or an elephant charge, are utterly O'Brian. Attenborough would whisper the charming text beautifully, if only he could find a Caesar.
The Manuscript
Eva Zeller
(Vintage, £6.99)
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The Holocaust and Germany's war crimes are reflected in an autumnal love affair between a Berlin schoolteacher and a German-Jewish botanist. These are ambitious subjects to squeeze into a novella, but surprisingly Zeller succeeds. In her grandparents' attic, Bea discovers a manuscript detailing her mother's fate after she hurried east in February 1945 to find her husband, invalided in a Pomeranian hospital. Does Bea's loss of her mother in a Soviet labour camp even merit grief when Jacob was an innocent victim of Nazism? It sounds like a trite German Dr Zhivago , especially with its St Petersburg climax, but Zeller dodges mawkishness.
Recherché
Jim Williams
(Scribner, £6.99)
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Harry Haze is a sinister Mary Poppins out of whose voluminous carpet bag comes a succession objects linked to his long and odd life. A Fabergé box, pornography allegedly written by Proust, a matchbox signed by Elvis and other knick-knacks illustrate his gothic tall tales, told to narrator John Harper and his girlfriend in a French village. While Harper, a home counties lawyer, grows ever more sceptical, Lucy is bewitched. When Lucy goes missing, Harper suspects she too has fallen for Haze's magic. Williams exuberantly muddies already dark waters with clever literary allusion, though sometimes he allows the delicious Haze to run off with the plot.
Manon Lescaut
Abbé Prévost
(Dedalus, £7.99)
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Why bother with another translation of a never-out-of-print classic? Dedalus, a publisher whose list leans heavily towards the darker side of European literature, has commissioned this new translation from Prévost scholar Steve Larkin. Manon is the perfidious object of the Chevalier des Grieux's affections. She betrays him; his love for her threatens his every moral tenet, yet he clings to a belief in the redemptive power of love. Manon Lescaut is both operatic high tragedy and picaresque adventure. As Larkin's introduction emphasises, the ambiguity of the Jesuitical Des Grieux means that this love is far from innocent, and an enduring puzzle.
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