BOOKS / Paperbacks

The Kenneth Williams Diaries ed Russell Davies, HarperCollins pounds 9.99. Kenneth Williams kept his kitchen stove wrapped in clingfilm; his self he wrapped up jealously in this diary. Far from the manic extrovert he liked to show the paying public, this is a portrayal of a metropolitan hermit - self-critical, vain, masturbatory (he called it 'having a Barclays'), fastidious, bookish, crabbed, suicidal. These day-to-day pages, often humdrum, rarely funny though often camp, are not Pepys or Waugh. Yet they engrossingly present a life on the sharp edge of neurotic disaster.

The Emperor's Last Island: A Journey to St Helena by Julia Blackburn, Minerva pounds 5.99. 'St Helena today,' says Blackburn, 'has hardly changed since the time when Napoleon cursed it for its thin soil and sudden mists.' Yet next month, we hear, St Helena becomes one of the last places on earth to receive television, which will change it in unpredictable ways of great interest to social scientists. This is not a sociologist's book. It is a personal, rather touching encounter with otherness - of the island and of Bonaparte himself, who lived out his last six years watching clouds, gardening a bit or simply lying in his bath. Nothing could have affected St Helena, and its view of itself, so much as that reluctant resident. Until now.

Eyes by Maggie Hemingway, Sceptre pounds 5.99. There's a type of chamber fiction in vogue which interweaves parallel but differently pitched tales from assorted historical eras. Eyes gives you four stories of women murdered in differing circumstances: the dark marriage of an Italian duchess; a sadistic French rural husband; the heiress wife of a charming villain; a poisoner in rural modern England. The common thread is of servants and neighbours who watch but do not intervene. Readers, like gossips and voyeurs, need eyes, and the pleasures of each are not wholly dissimilar.

Not Part of the Package: A Year in Ibiza by Paul Richardson, Pan pounds 5.99. Travel writers used to comb the globe for the unspoiled. Now the game is to sift the wreckage of tourism itself, to go off-piste from the playa and the pub-disco. As early as five pages into his four-season stint on Ibiza, Richardson casually invokes the blighted shade of Peter Mayle. But he's more Larry Durrell than Wicked Willy, and can afford to invite comparisons. As he tells of his scheme to plant vines in the hinterland, he sketches Ibiza's history and its motley modern inhabitants - peasants, hippies, expats, celebs, fakers, clubbers, boutiquers, tour reps, and he does so with sharp empathy rather than veiled cynicism.

In the Kingdom of Air by Tim Binding, Vintage pounds 5.99. A weatherman from Kent is in trouble during the Great Storm of 1987 - but Giles Doughty is a far cry (one imagines) from Michael Fish. He is hedonistic and sexually voracious - a subject treated in the opening pages with no blushes spared. But Giles is also tormented, his early life so teeming with evil, ugliness, sick humour and dark secrets that it is as if Hieronymus Bosch were let loose on the English suburbs. The narrative is rich, complicated and time-shifting: Binding in this first novel shows a bravura talent that is poetic, funny and tough.

The Weather in Iceland by David Profumo, Picador pounds 6.99. At 40-odd, the exiled Duke of London ruminates on his formative years. It is 1999. In Britain, law, order and politics have been replaced by a totalitarian 'military republic' in which the duke's kind is finally redundant. This turn of history, maybe because it seems so improbable, is little explored: Profumo's real interest is the nature of a 20th- century aristocrat. The hero's meditation on his upbringing - elegiac, moving, all too plausible - is spiced by dread that his father's dark, psychotic secret has been genetically visited on himself; he's terrorised, like all elite classes, by the double demons of blood and inheritance.

Paper Tigers by Nicholas Coleridge, Mandarin pounds 6.99. Here are 25 newspaper proprietors from around the world, profiled by a man who seems as deeply impressed - even overawed - by their presence as some people are by monarchs. So he provides the reader not only with the deals, coups and muscle-flexing of the magnate's daily round, but with plenty of lifestyle trivia too: the lavish office accoutrements, the yachts, the leisure activities, the spending sprees. It is a witty, slightly superficial, but nevertheless telling catalogue of men and women whose power is as immense as it is transitory.

Janice Gentle Gets Sexy by Mavis Cheek, Penguin pounds 5.99. Mavis Cheek's novel is about publishing, love and the hyping of sex. Her heroine is a writer of a different stripe from herself, whose innocent romances (in which not a bodice is ripped nor a condom unfurled) have made her richer than she knows. But now her American publisher, Morgan P Pfeiffer, decrees that she must get sexy, and sends his crack editor across the Atlantic to close a deal on this basis. What happens when Janice goes rather further than expected is not only funny, but the occasion for some sharp wit at the expense of Commerce and Eros.