BOOKS / Paperbacks

An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan, Vintage pounds 6.99. 'Said began beating John about the body as he lay on his mattress. The butt of his Kalashnikov thumped into him again and again.' It might be a brutal thriller, but this is Beirut, and the blows are raining down on John McCarthy, Terry Anderson and Keenan himself, and the author is not inventing anything but setting it down with the lucid self-possession that enabled him to survive four and a half years of terror. A moving and remarkable book.

Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney, Penguin pounds 5.99. Compulsively readable but vaguely schlocky attempt at the teeming Big Apple novel - more Bonfire of the Vanities than Bright Lights, Big City. The Calloways are contentedly married media thirtysomethings, ripe for a fall: the treatment of their trials and horripilations suggests that McInerney has stealthily moved into middle age and the middle of the road, or at least has turned his spotlight onto those who have.

The Oxford Book of the Sea, ed Jonathan Raban, pounds 7.99. This rich selection, whose sweep embraces The Faerie Queene, John Updike, and a wide range in between, emphasises the grandeur and nobility of writing about the sea, and the sense of awe that human beings have always felt when confronted with untamed water. That its editor is both a passionate seaman and deeply versed in watery literature is obvious from his fine introduction.

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety by Marjorie Garber, Penguin pounds 12.99. A US survey of transvestites - mostly male, married and middle- class - found that the largest group were computer engineers and the second largest truck drivers. Edward Hyde, colonial governor of New York (see above), is said to have dressed in women's clothing because he wanted to show due deference to his monarch, Queen Anne. This iconoclastic study of the way clothing constructs (and deconstructs) gender difference overturns many easy assumptions.

Riot, Risings and Revolution by Ian Gilmour, Pimlico pounds 12.50. The pundits were saying it in 1793, too - that theirs had become a more violent society. And perhaps they were right: riots, witch- hunts, stoning, bull-baiting, cock-fighting . . . But the refreshing emphasis of this magisterial study (by a historian and former Tory MP) is that 'in 18th-century England violence came much more from the rulers than the ruled'. Its account of elections, industrial disputes and the great rebellions in Scotland and Ireland locates the source of conflict in state terrorism, incompetence and corruption.

The Children of Men by P D James, Faber pounds 8.99. Many critics were sniffy about the Christian-allegorical subtext, but this vividly imagined and morally anxious story of a world devoid of children, and the collective horrors that involves, slowly turns from futuristic fable into the sort of unputdownable thriller P D James knows how to do best.

Daughters of the House by Michele Roberts, Virago pounds 5.99. After years of being sidelined as an experimental feminist, Michele Roberts - poet and dramatist as well as novelist - has finally achieved the prominence she deserves with this Booker-shortlisted novel. Set in provincial France after the war, it creates a taut and sensuous world of intriguing guilty silences, half-lies and shameful secrets that Therese and Leonie, cousins, use to fuel their own fantasies. Not to be missed.

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