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The Accordionist's Son, By Bernardo Atxaga, trans Margaret Jull Costa
 Atxaga's magisterial novel explores the life of David Imaz, a Basque immigrant, now dying on a ranch in California. Growing up a generation after the Spanish Civil War, he divides his time between his uncle's farm and the village, where he practises the accordion on the insistence of his authoritarian father.

This Year It Will Be Different, By Maeve Binchy
 If you have never sampled Binchy, this volume of short stories is a good introduction to the easy-going charms of Ireland's most practised storyteller. Set around the Christmas holidays, these neatly plotted tales of festive fall-out offer the private miseries of jilted brides, erring husbands and demanding children.

The Life of Samuel Johnson, By James Boswell
 No, you won't read this majestic new edition of the grandaddy of all biographies by next week, or even next year. What you may well do, mightily assisted by editor David Womersley's notes, is cherish it for ever as a source for dips, browses and rambles around an inexhaustible life.

Book Of The Week: Outliers, By Malcolm Gladwell
In 1904, a German professor of economics went back to work after a long bout of depression. He began to publish a series of essays about the links between a community, its core beliefs, and material success. Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism not only unleashed a century of debate and dispute. It more or less created the sociology of culture as a study of the interplay between individual actions and collective values – irrespective of whether his heirs agreed that (say) the Calvinist faith gave merchants an edge on the exchange. A man whose own inner torments had forced him to bail out from an ultra-competitive arena helped the 20th century to understand that high achievements often have roots that extend deeper and wider than personal drive and skill.

Getting off at Gateshead, By Jonathon Green
Jonathon Green is the nation's indefatigable lexicographer of filth, a tireless troweller in the slurry of the unsayable. His Cassell's Dictionary of Slang (1998) and Chambers Slang Dictionary (2008) are phenomenal compendia of "non-standard usages," ranging across the whole lexicon of English bar-room coinages. But he has a soft spot for rude words. Over a quarter-century, he has delighted in taxonomising thousands of terms for body parts, sexual activity, disease and bathroom practices that are not generally discussed in the presence of children, clergymen, great-aunts and Mr Charles Moore.

One Minute With: Julian Fellowes

Churchill's Wizards, By Nicholas Rankin
"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive". Churchill's Wizards tells the story of Britain's deceptive operations in two world wars. At times, trying to pick the plethora of acronyms (17F, NID17, EH, A Force, SOE, ISLD, SIME, SIS, Z, MI(R), MI9, PWE), from the camouflage broth, you don't know what effect it had on the enemy, but it sure must have confused the Allies. Nicholas Rankin acknowledges this: in 1943, 40 per cent of agents in Greece were working for at least three bodies, with the attendant waste and confusion.

Decoding the Heavens, By Jo Marchant
Sunken treasure. A mysterious artefact. Scrambled inscriptions. Warring academic egos. Technology 1,000 years before its time. The tale of a wondrous relic related in science journalist Jo Marchant's first book sounds like pulp fiction. But it is all true. One piece of complex clockwork challenges all conventional accounts of the history of invention, and puts ancient Greece in a whole new light.

My Book Of A Lifetime: The Life of Vertebrates, By JZ Young
I do not know if JZ Young was a religious man, but The Life of Vertebrates has the gravitas of a sacred text. The animals and bits thereof, depicted in drawings neat as woodcuts, are esoterica. It's a textbook – albeit, Young assures us, a very personal one. As a great book should, it intrigues as much as informs. Always, it implies there are layers of meaning beneath what can be summarised and that, no matter how deeply we probe, life remains mysterious.

The Atmospheric Railway, By Shena Mackay
In Shena Mackay's lush, entrancing tales, people are never quite who they seem to be. In this collection of new and selected stories, a long-disappeared illusionist with an embroidered bolero and ornamental dagger emerges from the sea to revenge himself on the lover who betrayed him; a woman can turn into a ferocious goat to pursue the professor whose lecture she attends; a tenderly remembered first lover encountered in a charity shop reveals a hairy face, a burgeoning belly and a sweater flecked with crumbs.

Observations: Put your prose under the knife
We all know what it's like to receive a healthy dose of constructive criticism – it might hurt a bit, but ultimately it's for our own good. Well, that's certainly the way the co-editors of Bad Idea magazine, Jack Roberts and Daniel Stacey work, and they've recently launched a new monthly debate night, The Butcher's Shop, to prove it.

Portobello, By Ruth Rendell
Away from her fictitious small town of Kingsmarkham and its Inspector Wexford, Ruth Rendell has become one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary London. One of the fascinations of the city is the village character which some areas retain, bringing together strange specimens of humanity. Nowhere are there odder people or greater contrasts than in Notting Hill, which has attracted Rendell's beady eye in other novels.

The Stuff of Thought, By Steven Pinker
 The memorable title of Shaffer's first (and sadly last) novel is the name of a war-time book club, invented by a group of Guern-sey villagers stopped by a German patrol for breaking curfew.

Pick Of The Picture Books: The Living Coast: An Aerial View of Britain's Shoreline, By Christopher Somervill
 Far more than just a serendipitous collection made by three curious men in a Cessna 182, The Living Coast: An Aerial View of Britain's Shoreline, by Christopher Somerville, with photographs by Adrian Warren and Dae Sasitorn (Last Refuge, £14.99) is an intimate document of Britain's ins and outs, its ebbs and flows and its precarious ecology, all from "a gull's eye" perspective.

The Word On: Sarah Palin

Origins, By Amin Maalouf, trans Catherine Temerson
Amin Maalouf is the celebrated author of novels such as Samarkand, Leo the African and The Rock of Tanios. They re-conjure Omar Khayyam in 11th-century Persia, the Christian Inquisition in North Africa, and the imperialist torsions of 19th-century Lebanon. Rather than sturdy historical narratives or perky metafictions, Maalouf's novels exemplify the elementary arts of invention.

Notes From an Exhibition, By Patrick Gale
Returning to the Cornish setting of his earlier works, Gale's 14th novel plunges into artistic circles of 1970s St Ives for a memorable story of family dysfunction and mental illness. Rachel Kelly is a gifted abstract painter, her career mapped out in the art-speak exhibition notes that accompany each chapter. As a troubled young woman, she's rescued by her husband-to-be, a mild-mannered Quaker, and brought back to his hometown of Penzance. Here, she has four children and a series of breakdowns. Sedated with the chemical cocktails of the day, she locks herself in the loft to paint - her children finally, and fatally, inured to the hurt caused by her soaring highs and anguished lows.

Anything Goes, By Lucy Moore
Dressed in a pink apron and slippers, Al Capone was cooking pasta for journalists when he announced his retirement from bootlegging. "Snorky" (as his friends called him) explained he was simply a regular guy providing a service but, if he wasn't appreciated, Chicago could go thirsty. The pinafore was an unexpected touch (despite the mobster's taste for tangerine or violet suits), but menace parading as innocence was his trademark. Capone, like many in the 1920s, understood the manipulative value of publicity.

The Lady Elizabeth, By Alison Weir
 Popular historian Alison Weir enters treacherous territory with a fictional re-telling of the early years of Elizabeth I and her much debated romance with Thomas Seymour, her stepmother's husband. "

The Good Tourist, By Lucy Popescu
 The difference between linguists and non-linguists is as cavernous and as tricky to define as the difference between the verbs "pour" and "fill" that means you can "pour water into the glass" but not "pour the glass with water".

Boyd Tonkin: Why misery needs company
A visiting Vulcan who dropped in to take the temperature of British culture and society would – in any chosen week – come away staggered by the howling hypocrisy and flagrant double standards perpetually on show. This week, our judicious alien's bemusement might have shot right off the scale. It seems – from every screamer of a red-top headline – that we loathe the idea of cruelty to defenceless children so viscerally that any professional who fails to prevent it straight away becomes a town-hall fiend in human form.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
 Popular historian Alison Weir enters treacherous territory with a fictional re-telling of the early years of Elizabeth I and her much debated romance with Thomas Seymour, her stepmother's husband. "

Mister Roberts, By Alexei Sayle
Barely 20 pages into this snappy novella, an Imperial cruiser of the Galactic Empire is sustaining hefty damage from rebel X-wings when a doom-laden drone nips into a Planetary Exploration Suit and deserts in a shuttle that crash-lands in Spain. The Suit, a robotic skin operated by the stumpy, lizard-like alien within, provides camouflage in the form of "a man who frequented jazz clubs in Montmartre 40 years ago – the time of the aliens' last visit to the earth".

Rising Star: Jennie Rooney, author
 South-east London gets a bad – or even non-existent – fictional press, with the wonderful Shena Mackay (see page 34) one of the few to find heartbreak and heroism in regions beyond the ken of the Northern Line. Now Mackay has a promising partner in grime.

The Disinherited, By Henry Kamen
 When the defeated Muslim king of Granada turned back to gaze on the city in 1492 at the pass still known as the Moor's Last Sigh, he inaugurated five centuries of exile culture. Ever since, Spaniards abroad have thought and dreamed of a lost homeland.

The Fire, By Katherine Neville
Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has become instant shorthand for those who consider it the last word in dumbed-down, crassly written fiction. But there is no denying the appeal of the globe-spanning, puzzle-based narrative, with strands reaching from ancient history to the modern world. Before The Code, Katherine Neville offered some ingenious sleight-of-hand in this style. Now she has followed up her debut novel, The Eight, with a blockbuster thriller that again pushes all the Brown buttons.

La's Orchestra Saves the World, By Alexander McCall Smith
Among his many talents, Alexander McCall Smith plays the contra-bassoon in the Really Terrible Orchestra, which he helped to found in Edinburgh. From the title of his new novel, the reader might expect a light-hearted romp about the formation of a scratch orchestra in the Second World War. What we get is a rather melancholy and subdued account of La (short for Lavender) Ferguson's life.

Nabokov's last, unfinished, novel finally to be published by his son
It is one of literature's most fiercely-guarded secrets, a great author's unfinished masterpiece that has lain deep within the vaults of a Swiss bank for more than three decades.

Sex, sore feet, and a 90-year-old up for the Costa
 A 90-year-old, whose work is described as a biographical account of "sex, love and sore feet", as well as impending death, has been shortlisted for the Costa book awards.

Memories of an SOE historian, By MRD Foot
MRD Foot was dropped into France in 1944, captured, paralysed by a pitch-fork through a vertebra on his fourth brave attempt to escape, and finally exchanged for four German officers. Such a heroic escapade recalls the ironic praise Alan Bennett heaped in 40 Years On on "The Breed": the 1930s school of snobbery-with-violence – imperial adventure stories replete with spies, suspense and sinister aliens.

Jackdaw Summer, By David Almond
 David Almond is an intensely local writer in constant search of universal themes.

Will America Change?, By Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
These authors' previous book was called Why Do People Hate America?, so you get some idea of where they're coming from. Their thesis here is that America has got to change, for all our sakes, but that there are precious few signs of its doing so. They analyse the US media and drama shows to produce evidence of an ideology that is both insular and aggressive; they reveal telling facts such as that in 2006, only six of the 100 staff in the Baghdad Embassy could even speak Arabic.

The Selman-Troytt Papers, By P J Barrington
This selection from the papers of the fictional Victorian scientist Jeremy Selman-Troytt includes extracts from such great works as "The First Time I Soiled my Trousers" and "My First Involuntary Ejaculation", as well as journal entries which chart the great man's struggle to perfect his hands-free prepuce retractor.

Boy wonder: A revealing view of Bruce Chatwin's early years at Sotheby's
 On a crisp winter morning 50 years ago Bruce Chatwin stepped off New Bond Street and into the galleries of Sotheby's for the first time. He was an 18-year-old, dough-faced boy straight from Marlborough College. The following eight years spent at the auction house were to prove pivotal. They would inform his unique prose style, introduce key themes to his work, provide him with a wife and create a lasting fascination with the allure of objects.

Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! by Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus, the intensely moving 300-page graphic novel that's as much about Spiegelman's difficult relationship with his father, an Auschwitz survivor, as it is a vicarious memoir of the Holocaust. More recently, In the Shadow of No Towers stood practically alone as a valid artistic response to 9/11. Just turned 60, Spiegelman is in danger of becoming the Grand Old Man who has made comics respectable.

Past Imperfect, By Julian Fellowes
There has always been a space on the bookshelves of Britain for a novel or two about class, and there have been some great ones in the last century, from P G Wodehouse's Empress of Blandings and Waugh's Brideshead Revisited to Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and Edward St Aubyn's mordant Never Mind.

The Original Frankenstein, By Mary Shelley with Percy Shelley ed Charles E Robinson
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was famously inspired by telling ghost stories with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron during a cold, wet summer in the Swiss Alps. It continues to serve as shorthand for the dangers of reckless scientific advance, yet literary historians have never been able to agree on its origins. Could Mary Shelley, an unpublished 18-year-old, really have written the novel? Or was Frankenstein's monster her future husband's creation?

Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the Beautiful, By Deborah Kay Davies
Deborah Kay Davies has achieved something rare: a collection of short stories wherein each story is complete in its own right (many were competition winners, or radio broadcasts) but which also work together as a novella-length sequence. The connecting thread is the two sisters Grace and Tamar: this is a study of a lifelong sibling rivalry, or rather, sister rivalry, since though they do have a brother he is not important enough even to merit a name. In fact, the male characters are shadowy and undeveloped in all these stories.

A Journey to Mount Athos, By François Augiérastrs Sue Dyson and Christopher Moncrieff
A youth finds himself in a strange village, near the sea, in the cool of the evening. He does not know how he got there, or who he is. A beautiful young woman explains that he is dead; if he becomes her lover, she will return him to the land of the living. Though tempted, he chooses instead to travel further into the land of death, to the island of Athos where he will try to reach the summit of the Holy Mountain.

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, By Gerald Martin
"Why do you want to write a biography? Biographies mean death." Such was Gabriel García Márquez's reaction to Gerald Martin's initial proposal. Yet 17 years and 300 interviews later, this born storyteller and dynamic politician is still very much alive.

Susan Sontag: 'It was so beautiful when H began making love to me'
"I intend to do everything ... I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too for it is everywhere! ... everything matters!" So wrote 16-year-old Susan Sontag in 1946. One of the finest American writers, thinkers, and political activists of the past four decades, Susan Sontag led a rich and creative life. Her opinions would anger and impress critics in equal measure.

The She-Apostle, By Glyn Redworth
Catholicism is not kind to women – and never has been. Today, the all-male hierarchy excludes women with vocations from priestly ministry on the grounds of their gender, while patronisingly telling them they are special but just not special enough to be the equals of men. As their role model, the chaps in clerical collars suggest to Catholic women the Virgin Mary, an odd choice, you might think, since, according to the same men, Christ's mother gave birth to a child without first having sex.

Poetry in brief: Drives by Leontia Flynn
Leontia Flynn's restless second collection sets off from Belfast, the poet's hometown, for a whistle-stop tour of cities such as Rome, Paris and New York. Poems whizz by. Only four of the volume's 53 pieces go over the page; many sit comfortably in the top half of one. They are packed, in an artful, off-the-cuff manner, with quotations and paraphrases, from Louis MacNeice and Elizabeth Bishop to Dorothy Parker and the Talking Heads. Along with Flynn's fondness for the sonnet, this learning recalls the Robert Lowell of Notebook. The tone of her poetry certainly suggests a writer trading the gravitas of Ireland's elder statesmen poets for a looser, American style.

The Atmospheric Railway, By Shena Mackay
Overweight Eloise pours oil into her bath before dressing for a blind date, but it merely lies on the surface of the hot water. "The bottle was labelled Mood for Romance and promised sensuous bliss. Foolish to have thought you could buy romance in Superdrug, two for the price of one..."

Hot young things: Hywel Davies reveals the next big names in fashion
For his new book, Hywel Davies scoured the catwalks and studios to find the next Karl or Miuccia of British fashion design. Here he reveals his quartet of rising stars – and the future classics you should be investing in

Blank Gaze, By Jose Luis Peixetotrs Richard Zenith
Among its cast of characters, Blank Gaze features a giant, a 120-year-old man, a blind prostitute, a devil who is also the local pastor and a pair of Siamese twins who are joined by one fingertip: magic realism, anyone? Set in a poverty-stricken village in rural Portugal where men tend sheep, seek shelter from the fierce sun in the shade of cork trees, and drink or get beaten up in the tavern at night, its theme is the harshness of life and the lifelong necessity of endurance.

Forgotten Authors No.14: Richard Bach
There are certain books only college students have the patience to read. In the Seventies, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance were romping up the book charts in university towns. Each generation of wide-eyed freshers promotes one of these into the bestsellers, and at least it can be said that the standard is improving. For all I know, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated could be wonderful beyond page 17.

Suzi Feay: Don't be scared, it's only Henry James
Ghost stories are just the thing for curling up with on a winter night, and at first Everyman's Ghost Stories (£10.99) seems to fit the bill. There are some wonderfully effective tales here: W W Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw" never loses its creepy appeal, while Alison Lurie's "The Highboy", about a piece of furniture with malevolent intent, is a more recent classic. P G Wodehouse and Elizabeth Taylor and Walter de la Mare all play by the rules. But it left me wondering whether the better the writer, the less effective the ghost story.

Out at the Movies, By Steven Paul Davies
It's 23 years since the late Vito Russo published his groundbreaking book about homosexuality in the movies, The Celluloid Closet. Later made into a documentary featuring everyone from Susan Sarandon to Harry Hamlin, the book has certainly dated. Read today, it seems awfully prescriptive. Russo's central thesis, that gay men and women have always been portrayed as one-dimensional figures, may have appeared true at the time, but fails to allow for the fact that some gay films, for example the much-maligned The Boys in the Band, were actually written by gay men who knew only too well the self-loathing stereotypes they were describing. Russo also forgets that one man's "negative image" might be another man's "own special creation", to quote from the popular gay anthem "I Am What I Am". But The Celluloid Closet still has much to recommend, not least its exhaustive account of how early films such as 1895's The Gay Brothers were celebrating gay relationships long before the Hays Code and the McCarthy witchhunts put a stop to positive representations of lesbians and gay men.

Credo: Anne Rice

The 50 Best Winter Reads
 Gripped by thrillers? Hooked on classics? Our panellists select the hottest books for colder months – whatever your literary leaning.

Nothing to Fear, By Matthew D'Ancona
The Bluebeard myth taps into one of the deepest elements of a love affair: the need to learn about the lover's past. Warnings may strew the path. Still, that last door into the secret heart is irresistible.

Turned Out Nice Again, By Louis Barfe
"Light entertainment" is a slippery concept. In the introduction to Turned Out Nice Again, his history of its British forms, Louis Barfe quotes Eric Maschwitz, head of Light Entertainment at BBC television in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He reportedly loathed the term and would demand: "What is it meant to be the opposite of? Heavy Entertainment? Or Dark Entertainment?"

Soul of the Age, By Jonathan Bate
Jonathan Bate sets out to write "an intellectual biography" of Shakespeare; or, as he puts it, to explore "Shakespeare's wit in the full 16th-century sense of the word". He loosely structures Soul of the Age around "the seven ages of man" speech by the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It. Nothing wrong with that: it has the merit of following Shakespeare's own potted view of the curve of human life. But Bate, to be true to his disdain for subjective expression in literature, ought to acknowledge that these lines, though written by Shakespeare, are spoken by a jaded cynic whose name means "privy".

The Five Books of Moses: A Translation and Commentary, By Robert Alter
 Lively and lucid, Alter's translation is also meticulous. If less stirring than the "In the beginning..." of the King James version, his opening has a greater precision: "When God began to create heaven and earth..."

My Book Of A Lifetime: The Tale of Pigling Bland. By Beatrix Potter
No, it's not Crime and Punishment, though that turned the Thames into the Neva and made me skulk around for weeks as Raskolnikov. And it's not Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though I was Stephen Dedalus too, pious one minute and profaning the next. Instead, it was a small, grey book with falling-out pages, kept in a box in a cupboard at the top of the stairs in my great-aunt's house. On every visit it was found and read again.

The Maytrees, By Annie Dillard
 Annie Dillard shines in the US literary firmament more as a poetic autobiographer and nature writer – in books such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood – than as a novelist. But this finely sculpted, deeply felt novel of place, time and love more than matches her triumphs in non-fiction.

The Winter of the World, Edited by Dominic Hibberd & John Onions
 As always with UK anthologies, this collection of "poems of the Great War" puts a barbed-wire fence around the British muse to exclude French, German, Russian and Italian voices.

Cultural Life: Philip Pullman, author

Why don't women write 'Big Ideas Books?'
 An important issue has been preoccupying the transatlantic blogosphere in this post-Obama world, and it concerns the question: What do Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and AC Grayling have in common? It is not a joke about the search results for the world's worst dating profile on mysinglefriend.com, and nor is it an advert for hair tonic. The answer is that all these people have published big, philosophical, opinionated treatises recently about the state of the world and their ever-so important views on it. The supplementary answer causing all the debate is that all these people are men.

Boyd Tonkin: The surge in stories from an endless war
Change has come – but not yet to Afghanistan. We know that President-elect Obama intends to step up the pace of combat there. Every week brings news of British losses in the badlands of Helmand, and their rancorous aftermath at home. For once, no one can justly accuse Western publishers and readers of turning a blind eye to a messy war – and its opaque origins – in a faraway land. After the enormous global cult of The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini's second novel about the roots of the quagmire – A Thousand Splendid Suns – has been bobbing around the top five of the British paperback fiction charts for weeks. The post-2001 resurgence of the country, and its knotty conflicts, in the public mind coincided with British literary landmarks both in fiction (Philip Hensher's historical epic The Mulberry Empire) and reportage (Rory Stewart's The Places In Between).

It's a PC World, By Edward Stourton
The distinguished broadcaster Edward Stourton has created a little bit of a splash with his fifth book, by employing the simple expedient of shopping the Queen Mother. Setting out a couple of conversations that piqued his interest in the phenomenon of political correctness, he recalls a private interview with "the nation's favourite grandmother" in which she explains to him that the "EEC" will never work with "all those Huns, Wops and Dagos".

The Good Soldier, By Gary Mead
 AN Wilson called for one of the most prominent statues in Whitehall to be vandalised. He claimed that Douglas Haig, the Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force from 1915-18, was "arguably a mass murderer". In this epic but absorbing re-assessment, Mead casts doubt on the universal execration of the general.

The Wrong Kind of Snow, By Antony Woodward & Robert Penn
 The perfect stocking-filler for a weather buff, this book contains a meteorological report for every day of the year. Met men include the Venerable Bede, Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys: "The King said it was the coldest day [16 March 1667] he ever knew in England." 15 October 1987 was the day that Michael Fish said "Don't worry" about a hurricane.

The Secret Life of the English Language, By Martin H Manser
Since most readers of this book will be practitioners of its subject matter, they may feel the urge to chip in their twopenn'orth to this tasty gallimaufry of linguistic oddities.

First Impressions: The Turn Of The Screw, by Henry James (1898)
Coming immediately on the heels, as one may say, of his painfully elaborate treatment of an almost worthless subject in a story called In the Cage, this still newer volume by Mr James is doubly surprising and gratifying. We should not care, certainly, to recommend it offhand as agreeable reading for habitually light-hearted or light-minded persons, though to be sure the second of the two stories is a perfect example of pure comedy, worthy of Meredith, buoyantly uplifting, rich in humorous fancy, both exquisite and of seeming spontaneity in its play of wit.

One Minute With: Alexei Sayle

Rising Star: Nam Le Author
 Run from Swansea, the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30 not only boasts a highly covetable cheque – at £60,000 – but local stardust in the shape of its "ambassador", Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Pick Of The Picture Books: Paintings in Proust
 No great novelist intrigues, or overawes, potential readers more than Marcel Proust. How can any newcomer dip a toe into the vast rolling stream of In Search of Lost Time and find the confidence to swim and not drown? Although not designed as a novices-start-here guide, Eric Karpeles' gorgeous and fascinating book Paintings in Proust (Thames & Hudson, £25) offers a sumptuous tasting menu of the work.

The Burnt-Out Town of Miracles, By Roy Jacobsen
 Since the age of Stendhal, the finest fiction about war often takes the form of turning-point events seen from the humanising angle of bewildered bit-part players. So it is with this compact and compelling novel by an iconic Norwegian writer who, in this book, writes about his Finnish neighbours.

A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland
"Elected silence, sing to me, and beat upon my whorled ear": Gerard Manley Hopkins's paradoxical invocation echoes in Sara Maitland's exploration of the richness of chosen silence in a world determined to be noisy. Hopkins finally opted for communal life among the Jesuits, Maitland for a hermit's life in south-west Scotland. Her artful book, mixing autobiography, travel writing, meditation and essay, describes her route away from urban brouhaha towards increased solitude and communion with the God she encountered in the desert, on mountain-tops, and finally on the Scottish moors.

Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, Edited by Richard Greene
 With the exception of the letters of his friend Evelyn Waugh, it's hard to think of a more entertaining collection than this epistolary biography.

Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, By Daniel Everett
The Pirahã Indians of the Amazon are a very peculiar people. They number fewer than 400 and have no myths, rituals or history. Their language is unrelated to any other living tongue. It can be whistled, sung, hummed or spoken. It has no words for numbers, colours, left or right, brother or sister.

The Word On: Michael Crichton
[Crichton] was a prolific author of science fiction and medical fiction, whose books have sold over 150 million copies... [He] used his technical training, vivid imagination and mastery of English to spin some of the most enjoyable – and scary – stories that often depicted scientific advancements going awry... A notable recurring theme... is the pathological failure of complex systems and their safeguards, whether biological ('Jurassic Park'), military/organizational ('The Andromeda Strain'), technical ('Airframe') or cybernetic ('Westworld').

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997, By Piers Brendon
 This is animmense book but you would not wish for it to be a single page shorter. It's the telling, often hilarious detail that propels the vast narrative.

Child's Play, By Carmen Posadas, trans. Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopskinson
This is a classy murder mystery whose rushing narrative is stained by a deceit perpetrated before the story begins. Luisa, 52, is a successful writer living in Madrid – rather like Carmen Posadas. Although single, Luisa enjoys having a Man in Her Life. At the moment it's Enrique, a mattress-maker whose down-to-earth observations and indifference to Luisa's literary world are a great comfort to her.

Love all, By Elizabeth Jane Howard
Since her debut, The Beautiful Visit in 1950, Elizabeth Jane Howard's ever-popular fiction has been concerned with the romantic entanglements of the upper middle-classes. Her latest novel, set in the late Sixties, finds its author, now 85, as clear-sighted about marriage, sex and love as that other great chronicler of pastoral passions, Jane Austen – a writer frequently invoked here.

Hallelujah Junction, By John Adams
 John Adams's Hallelujah Junction radiates a calm, Californian confidence, letting its ideas unfold at a gentle pace.

Afghan tale of oppression wins French literature prize
An Afghan who fled his country 24 years ago carrying his mother's carpet and a few crumpled bank notes was yesterday awarded France's premier literary prize. Atiq Rahimi, 46, took the 2008 Prix Goncourt – the French equivalent of the Man Booker prize – with his first novel in French, a stark essay on the oppression of women in Afghanistan.

BBC presenter thought Queen Mother was a 'bigot'
 The Queen Mother once labelled some of Britain's EU colleagues as "Huns, wops and dagos", a BBC broadcaster has said.

Kiss & tell: The twilight world of 'tart-lit'
 Four and a half years sounds like a long time to keep a secret – especially a sexual one. Yet last month saw the publication by Orion of the third book under the pseudonym "Belle de Jour". The true name of the former London "escort", cult blogger and then bestselling author remains as much of a mystery as in spring 2004.

Pynter Bender, By Jacob Ross
Ten-year-old Pynter Bender was born blind but now gazes upon the world with his "new and delicate eyes", since his sight has been healed by a medicine woman. The world is depicted in all its harshness and beauty in this evocative, lyrical debut novel of life in the cane fields of pre-independence Grenada, as the Caribbean island struggles from the shackles of serfdom.

Aravind Adiga: You Ask The Questions
 How do you feel about the US election result? David Moore, London

Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, By Michael Deeley with Matthew Field
Michael Deeley has worked on some of the most iconic films of the past half-century, from The Italian Job to The Deer Hunter, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and – my personal favourite – Blade Runner. His book is full of jaw-dropping revelations and is a detailed analysis of everything a producer has to do in order to get a film made.

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Heart-Shaped Box, By Joe Hill
This should be called "Abused Women and Girls", as they are who this unpleasantly creepy little novel is about. The "hero" is a middle-aged heavy rock star, Jude Coyne, a collector of "death memorabilia" including a snuff movie, who is somewhat deservedly being haunted by another vile character, the ghost of an old man who liked to molest little girls, including his own stepdaughter. Said stepdaughter later killed herself after being dumped by Jude, and now her sister has taken revenge by tricking Jude into buying her stepfather's haunted suit.

Alexei Sayle: A comrade in Bloomsbury
Alexei Sayle greets me with a friendly handshake. We are in his spacious ground-floor flat in a fine town house in Bloomsbury. I comment on the blue plaques which adorn the neighbouring houses at frequent intervals. "Yes, people round here tend to identify their house by the plaque," says Sayle. "Like, 'I live in Sir Philip Sidney, or next door to Vera Britten, or three doors down from Dickens'."

Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales from Burns to Buchan, ed Gordon Jarvie
So many of these tales are concerned with loss and death – the loss of children or a partner, or the threat of extinction from an alien hand – that it's no surprise to learn many were written either against the backdrop of war or famine, or about a specific battle or conflict. The hope of survival in another form is apparent too, with vanished lovers or children being transformed into birds or animals, giving many of the stories an added poignancy.

The Smoking Diaries: The Last Cigarette, By Simon Gray
This valedictory from Simon Gray, who died in August, is a delight, full as it is of all that is best and worst about human nature: hatred, fear, joy, generosity, compassion, honesty. In it, he is facing up to the end of 60 years of smoking, so a certain irascibility is inevitable, but it's always amusing how the small things cause the greatest outbursts – for example his utter disgust at the woman next to him on a plane who can't stop sneezing and blowing her nose and stuffing paper cups with used hankies.

Watching the Watchmen, By Dave Gibbons
Watchmen, first published in 1986 and never since out of print, can lay claim to being the greatest ever comic. I say comic, because it was originally published in 12 monthly instalments: its later collection into a single volume did more than anything else to popularise a new artform – the "graphic novel".

Teenage Flicks, compiled by Paul Willetts
In the years BC (Before Computers) of the 1970s and '80s, the football game Subbuteo was played by more than 30 million people. Digital dexterity was the order of the day even then; one world champion, Andrea Piccaluga, had his flicking finger insured for £150,000.

Ways of Seeing, By John Berger
I first read this book as a student, 20 years ago, and it sparked off my interest in the kind of art criticism that feminist theory subsequently seemed to be exploring best.

Just After Sunset, By Stephen King
When I interviewed Stephen King for this paper in 2006, he told me that the night before we met he'd had a dream that was so vivid he'd woken up in the middle of the night and wondered how anybody "could have so much power in their heads to have a dream like that". I begged him to tell me about the dream but he refused, saying he was certain it would show up in his fiction sooner or later. In the end notes to his latest collection, Just After Sunset, King expands on what he was going through at the time. Before coming to England to promote his novel Lisey's Story, he'd decided to go cold turkey and stop using the anti-depressant drug Doxepin, which he'd been taking to numb the chronic pain he'd been experiencing since his road accident in 1999. The side effects of quitting this drug were astonishing dreams.

Forgotten authors No. 13: Dodie Smith
I'd like to think that Dodie Smith is not forgotten by new generations of readers, but her curse is to have been eclipsed by Disney, for Ms Smith wrote The Hundred And One Dalmations. It would be a shame if she was remembered only for the films, for there was far more to her career. A Lancastrian born in 1896, Smith entered RADA but failed as an actress, and went to work for Heal's furniture store. During this time she became a successful author, inspiring the headline "Shopgirl writes play".

A Scandalous Man, By Gavin Esler
From his foreign news journalism alone, I expected far better from Esler than this perfunctory political father-versus-son tale. It's spring 2005, and translator Harry Burnett's estranged father has just made what appears to be a suicide attempt. Why they have become estranged is drawn out through the flashbacks of Robin Burnett's parallel narrative from 1982, when he was in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet until scandal forced him to resign.

Page Turner: Sailing to Byzantium with Sir Bob
I've been having a Yeatsian week. First off, I went to the British Library for Josephine Hart's Poetry Hour. The novelist has been promoting poetry since 2004, charming the likes of Jeremy Irons, Juliet Stevenson and Ralph Fiennes into performing for free. Hart introduced key themes from W B Yeats's work and life, and Harriet Walter, Dominic West and Sir Bob Geldof read a generous selection of the poems to a glam media crowd. Hart's ever-smiling husband, Maurice Saatchi provided the astonishingly huge spray of white roses on the stage, quite dwarfing the bouquet presented by Hart's Virago publisher, Lennie Goodings.

The Opposite Bastard, By Simon Packham
Timothy Salt, a "resting" actor ("Nigh on twenty years in the acting profession had given me a solid grounding in DHSS form filling"), has exhausted the patience of the authorities. He is assigned as carer to a brilliant quadriplegic, whose name, Michael Owen, its owner bitterly resents. Michael has made it to Oxford, where everyone is keen to meet him, though not to get to know him. Philip Sydney, a posh boy with a curious hostility to poshness, seizes on Michael for the lead in his avant-garde, hopelessly amateur production of Hamlet. He ropes in a fellow student, Anna Jenkins, sweet, daffy and uncertain, as the ideal Ophelia. So, Philip wants Anna (in every sense); Anna wants Philip (romantically); Timothy wants a break, and sees Michael getting it. Michael, the gruff, still centre of this self-centered world, just wants to have an orgasm.

A Mercy, By Toni Morrison
In a harsh world in which humans are subjugated for their race, religion or class, mercy manifests itself in strange ways. Is it an act of compassion or cruelty for a mother to murder her baby in order to save it from the living death of slavery, as Sethe does in Morrison's prize-winning novel, Beloved? A Mercy, Morrison's first novel since the compelling Love (2003), is a prelude to Beloved, set in the infancy of the slave trade, in the 1680s and 1690s, in an America divided by wealth and religion, and it elucidates the oppressive forces enabling slavery to happen at all.

One Minute With: Cecelia Ahern