Be Cool
Elmore Leonard
Penguin, £6.99, pp292
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Chili Palmer, Leonard's laid-back protagonist, approaches his profession of film-making much as his creator constructs his novel: assemble a gaggle of idiosyncratic characters, weave a plot to incorporate them all, give the impression that the story is writing itself effortlessly.
Against the backdrop of shallow Los Angeles, Leonard rustles up a plot that, while bordering on the incredible, certainly showcases his expert ear for dialogue. The assassination of Tommy Athens, an acquaintance of Chili, in broad daylight jumps the latter's imagination.
Juxtapose the lives and aspirations of a honey-toned beauty, a good black cop, a big gay Samoan bodyguard and a few unsavoury characters plucked from the music industry, stir in a few members of the Russian mafia for flavour and a great novel, slick as oil, is born.
Starcrossed
AA Gill
Black Swan, £6.99, pp349
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Gill was justifiably awarded the Literary Review 's Bad Sex Prize for this prize example of pap. Quotes from the pornographic manuscript penned by the vile Clive (friend of the hero) are particularly worthy of that accolade.
The plot is a tired rehash of Notting Hill: Lee Montana, archetypal American glamourpuss celebrity, plucks John Dart, aimless poet, Oxford graduate, bookshop assistant from obscurity. Sex, shopping and dining at fancy restaurants frequented by the likes of Joan Collins ensues with John equally discomfited and hypnotised by this new world of riches and fame. Cue musings on life, love and self, padded out with acidic attacks on hoi polloi at every possible opportunity as this laughably awful novel lurches towards its half-cocked happy ending.
The Tulip
Anna Pavord
Bloomsbury, £8.99,pp295
Delicate Coquette, Matchless Pearl and Those That Burn the Heart are but a fraction of the fancy names given to the myriad varieties of a flower that has bewitched men for centuries. In her erudite, enthusiastic study, Pavord chronicles man's obsession with the tulip from the Turkish Era in Constantinople under Sultan Ahmed III to the 'Tulipomania' of seventeenth-century Holland to the present day.
Colour illustrations complement Pavord's passages on changing perceptions of the bloom while the odd anecdote injects humour. Though the popularity of the tulip may wax and wane, though the advent of horticulture has robbed the bloom of some of its mystery, its magic endures - underlined by the export of two million flowers from the Netherlands every year.
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
Nathan Englander
Faber & Faber, £6.99, pp205
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Englander's collection of short stories united by Jewish themes is an impressive, confident debut threaded with wry humour and evocative detail.
The action moves from Stalin's Russia through New York to contemporary Israel with Englander's focus tight on his characters' lives, from the hirsute Gitta Floog as desperate to rid herself of her husband as she is to banish the hair from her upper lip, to Charles, a Gentile, whose epiphany in the back of a cab that he is Jewish reveals also the prejudice of those dearest to him. The final story is the most powerful, the setting the aftermath of a bomb in Jerusalem, the mood serious, an overview of the Jewish people, effecting a neat conclusion to this sympathetic, eloquent examination of individual lives.
Genome
Matt Ridley
4th Estate, £8.99, 344pp
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'Seaweed is your distant cousin and anthrax one of your advanced relatives,' reveals Ridley in this history of mankind, informed by advances in genetics, written with spirit and passion.
Expanding on this statement in the 23 chapters of his thorough, complex autobiography of the human species, each one relating to the pairs of chromosomes in each individual, Ridley aims, for the most part successfully, to elucidate scientific phenomena for the layman.
The genome, (the collective noun for our approximately 100,000 genes) can be read as the dictionary of all life from plant to animal, bug to blob, explaining our place in the world and the processes of evolution, even allowing Ridley to make the provocative claim that there may exist a gene responsible for free will.
