Books: Paperback roundup

Beam Me up, Scotty by Michael Guinzburg, Rebel Inc pounds 6.99. According to our lowlife narrator, Ed, a "stupid stinking drug addict and alcoholic", New York's East Village is a godforsaken cesspit seething with "dope-sniffing stemsucking crackerjacks". And he is on a Charles Bronson-style mission to purge it. This is Ed "AD (after detox)", and he has come home to find his wife selling herself on the streets, his sons being abused by her pimp, and a meretricious kind of haven in Hard Drugs Anonymous meetings. Armed with a Glock, daggers and a vicious bull terrier, Ed takes his message of recovery into the crack dens, and trades chemical highs for blood lust. Guinzburg delivers sentences packed with internal rhymes, rhythms and alliterations that echo the frantic soul-searching of his horrific anti- hero. Lurid violence and sex notwithstanding, Beam Me up, Scotty (the crackhead's prayer of deliverance) is a compelling satire of the self- indulgent excesses of desperate de-toxers who use the 12 Steps of the program ("KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid") to keep their disease at bay. Urban noir for the morally dispossessed.

The Food of Italy: Region by Region by Claudia Roden, Vintage pounds 9.99. Claudia Roden's encyclopaedic guide to regional Italian cookery is not only a lesson in local cuisines, but a tantalisingly condensed brodo of travel, history and linguistics. Her writing is lucid, her recipes easy to follow. She concerns herself with the piatti tipici rather than the Michelin-inspired haute cuisine, because she understands that Italians prefer casareccio (homemade) fare to the celebrity chef. She is thorough, too. When she tells us of her favourite dish from Parma, Tortelli alle erbette, she explains that erbette, rather than translating as "herbs" comes from the dialect, arbetta, which in turn is derived from the Latin herba beta (spinach beet, or Swiss chard). Once you have digested its etymology, you must stuff the filling into tortelli, a type of large ravioli with code (tails). Then, she promises, "You will understand at once the difference between a great dish and industrial ravioli sold by the yard." Roden's impressive knowledge of the political and agricultural characteristics of the 20 administrative states underpins her gastronomic sensibilities to make this a classic and accessible introduction to one of the great cuisines of the world.

Baby Love by Louisa Young, Flamingo pounds 6.99. Belly dancers in Shepherd's Bush have a tough time of it, if Louisa Young is to be believed; and sometimes that's tough going in itself. Still, this first novel is a funny account of embattled single-parenthood and the things a girl has to do to keep mind, body, soul and baby together. Evangelina's struggles begin when her motorcycle crashes into a car, crippling her and killing her pregnant sister. She's left holding the posthumously born Lily. Her precarious existence becomes even more fragile when feckless Jim, Lily's father, demands custody of his daughter. The men in her life are no help either. First there's Ben, a bent copper whom she enlists to protect her from Jim, but who gets a bit carried away; then there's Eddie the predatory gangster who has a thing for belly-dancers even when they're crippled, and to complicate matters further, a useless ex-boyfriend pops up in the service of pervy Eddie. Still, Young writes well about the joys of mother love, and makes self-denial and smelly nappies far more appealing than the gilded lives of her relentlessly hip contemporaries.

Philip of Spain by Henry Kamen, Yale pounds 9.95. Four hundred years after the death of Philip II, Spain's most misunderstood monarch; this is the first fully researched biography of the ruler of the most extensive empire the world has known. In the past, scholars have tended to identify Philip with the political events of his reign rather than by his person, and his enemies, then and now, have focused on the Armada, the Spanish Inquisition, and genocide of native Americans; Kamen attempts to restore his reputation. He writes of a man consumed by duty, and contends that Philip opposed the excesses of his colonising marauders, but had little control over the further reaches of his empire. Furthermore, far from being the dour Catholic tyrant Protestants love to hate, Kamen describes a cosmopolitan, fun-loving Renaissance prince, jousting, carousing and patronising the arts in equal measure. Kamen also explains that by 1560, 17 years into Philip's reign, England and France had executed more Protestants than had Spain. Of course, there is the little matter of Philip's over-enthusiastic cleansing of troublesome Protestants from the Netherlands, but Kamen asks us to set this in the context of England's policy in Ireland. Kamen ends up reinforcing the fearsome legend of a man so hardened by his own sense of duty that he locked his own son in a tower, where the hapless prince died by smothering himself in ice.

The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman by Bruce Robinson, Bloomsbury pounds 6.99. Bruce Robinson, cult director and screenwriter of Withnail and I, turns his considerable talents to novel-writing in this Dickensian tribute to childhood. It's 1950s seaside England, and Thomas is an overwrought 13-year-old, surrounded by nutters in a crumbling Gothic house. His Second World War- obsessed Grandpa likes to hang his testicles over the banister, his sociopathic Dad keeps a woman on the side called Ruby Round the Corner, while Thomas deposits his excrement around the house in a bid for attention. First love and a stunning revelation provide the climax to this endearingly impressionistic work.

Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida translated by Erie Prenowitz, Chicago pounds 9.50. Notorious French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida considers the diverse and disparate meanings contained within the concept of archive, the Greek roots of which stand for both "commencement' and "commandment". In short, an archive contains documented "beginnings" initiated through law. In concentrating on the Freud Museum (where he delivered this lecture), he addresses the archiving of the unconscious (and what is left out in the circumlocutions of the psychoanalytic canon), and the further blurring of boundaries between public and private life with the advent of e-mail. So when he commences this teasingly slippery text of suggestions, puns and prefixes with "Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive", it should all make perfect sense by the end.