Sex, death and marriage

Elena Seymenliyska and Alfred Hickling on The North of England Home Service | The Search | The Bride Stripped Bare | Joseph Knight | Seven Tales of Sex and Death | Someone to Run With

The North of England Home Service, by Gordon Burn (Faber, £7.99)

"Nostalgia, or homesickness, is never about the past but about felt absences or a sense of something lacking in the present." Ray Cruddas - a once-famous Northern comedian now operating in the showbusiness shadows - has turned nostalgia into a living with Bobby's, "the kind of club that takes you back even if you were never there originally". Former boxer Jackie Mabe helps him run it, as he has helped by being Ray's "eyes and ears, his butler and gofer" for 30 years. There's no plot as such, just one day in these men's lives serving as the framework for a series of looping reminiscences that span the postwar years, and travel from the mining towns of the northeast down to Hackney's boxing clubs, Spitalfield's Jewish tenements, Brixton's cellar bars and Soho's strip joints. Burn is also known for his non-fiction; dense with description, his third novel has an almost forensic attention to detail. ES

The Search, by Geoff Dyer (Abacus, £7.99)

Walker is a tracker, hired by Rachel to find her missing husband, Malory. He wants to sleep with Rachel, which is one reason why he takes the job. But he's also drifting, waiting to see what comes his way. There is nothing to go on, not even a photograph, yet Walker has a knack for thinking himself into his target's head, and arriving in places Malory has just left: towns such as Usfret, where all the people inexplicably crowd together to form a vast millipede, and Despond, where each day starts with contentment, turns to disappointment and ends in a frantic urge to leave. Walker's search also takes him to a town completely empty of people and one where everyone is frozen still. Dyer describes his latest book, Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It, as an unreliable map of some of the landscapes of his life. The Search, first published in 1993, is an intoxicating road trip in the company of a man sleepwalking his way across an unmapped landscape. ES

The Bride Stripped Bare, by Anonymous (Harper Perennial, £6.99)

When this came out in hardback, we were expected to swallow the conceit of its anonymity, even though its author's identity was revealed as soon as the book found a publisher. Now the conceit is stretched even further, thanks to a "Meet the author" addendum and a "Dear reader" letter from Nikki Gemmell herself. The story - the secret emotional and sexual life of a "seemingly good, contented wife" - is also loaded with conceits: that the heroine's infidelities are a victory for women's rights; that having a baby "as an insurance policy against panicky loneliness" is anything but repugnant. Then there's the conceit of the second-person narrative, as if her story is your story; and, ultimately, the conceit that the flaunted anonymity is about honesty and not publicity. Gemmell, an ex-journalist, researched this novel by emailing friends to ask their opinions about sex. The result has all the profundity of a pile of old women's magazines. ES

Joseph Knight, by James Robertson (Fourth Estate, £7.99)

The Scots presence among 18th-century sugar planters in the West Indies was so strong that slaves in certain parts of the colonies were versed in Gaelic. This was something of an embarrassment to enlightened Edinburgh, and Robertson engages an exhaustive cast of notable Scots to debate the landmark case of Joseph Knight, a slave transported to Scotland who refused to be a slave any longer. The case for abolition is cogently argued, but the emotional balance of the book is scuppered by Robertson's strange decision to withhold his hero's presence until the final section. There's a fine, affectionate passage evoking the tempestuous voyage from Jamaica in which Knight's owner coaxes his protégé from the brink of death. But as an explication of the unusually intense bond between master and slave, it is too little, too late and leaves the rest of the book's arguments feeling as dry as an old ship's biscuit. AH

Seven Tales of Sex and Death, by Patricia Duncker (Picador, £7.99)

Patricia Duncker's disquieting volume is a collection of night pieces, the product of watching too many bad thrillers in the small hours at her French retreat. When Duncker has difficulty sleeping, she nods off in front of pulpy psycho-dramas, whose staple cast of cops, pimps and homicidal maniacs inhabit the stories of this collection. The outstanding piece is a tale that stylishly weaves together modern archaeology and myths of ancient sacrifice with a brutal media murder reminiscent of the Jill Dando affair. At the other end of the scale is a splendidly grumpy piece about a bad-tempered British playwright holidaying in France, who nurses a deep loathing for her convivial Gallic neighbours. Allowing the dark side of her imagination such free reign means that Duncker often oversteps the boundaries of good taste. But bad taste never tasted quite as piquant as it frequently does here. AH

Someone to Run With, by David Grossman (Bloomsbury, £7.99)

Lego is the most versatile of toys. For the very young, there are oversized bricks, from which you graduate to regular Lego, and finally Technical Lego for kids who want to become mechanical engineers. Grossman introduces an interesting innovation - psychological Lego, which enables the author to snap together readymade characters. Tamar, a 16-year-old Israeli, is "missing that Lego part in her soul that could connect her to another person". The missing brick turns out to be Assaf, the kind of boy who keeps a small screwdriver attached to the back of his shoe. Perhaps the most absurd thing of all is that Grossman attempts to load a thin analysis of urban street kids with fairytale symbolism. When they're not described as Lego pieces, Tamar and Assaf are "lonely human snowflakes, desperate for assurance that somewhere in that empty space hovered another like it". I suppose that's more poetic than being a little plastic brick. AH

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