About the Author <br></br>Middle Age: A Romance <br></br>Now You See Me <br></br>Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage <br></br>Late Victorian Holocausts

About the Author, by John Colapinto (Fourth Estate, £6.99, 254pp)

Ever nursed dreams of writing a best-selling novel, but haven't quite got round to putting pen to paper? John Colapinto's début describes the ultimate short cut to life in the literary fast lane.

Bookstore assistant Cal Cunningham, the novel's narrator, has always believed that any day soon he will pen the next Great American Novel. When his room-mate, Stewart, pips him to the post, he's beside himself with rage and self-hate – until Stewart is knocked off his bike in a road traffic accident.

The story of how Cal proceeds to steal his dead room-mate's manuscript, and have it published under his own name, takes on the thrilling momentum of a Patricia Highsmith novel.

The posthumous novel becomes a bestseller, its "author" the toast of New York. Now rich and famous, with the magazine profiles to match, Cal moves to rural Vermont, where he meets and falls in love with Stewart's ex-girlfriend.

Stepping into his dead friend's shoes, Cal displays the chippy confidence of someone who feels they are only appropriating what is rightfully theirs. The suspense grows as Colapinto skilfully builds on the homely details of Cal's shiny new life – the literary dinner parties, the happy marriage, the well-appointed study in which to write.

Part send-up of the American publishing scene, part Highsmith rip-off, Colapinto's page-turning chiller is further enlivened with lashings of lesbian sex and at least one gruesome murder. Best of all are the novel's early chapters, recreating the author's own miserable years as a wannabe writer.

Middle Age: A Romance, by Joyce Carol Oates (Fourth Estate, £6.99, 540pp)

Well-fed, well-dressed and well-heeled, the inhabitants of Salthill-on-Hudson, a heritage "village" half an hour out of New York, look much younger than they really are – passing as late thirtysomethings well into their fifties. When one of their number, sexy sculptor Adam Berendt, is killed in a boating accident, shock waves are felt throughout the town. The entire community finds itself in the grip of a middle-aged crisis – husbands start leaving wives, wives sign up for art classes and divorced couples start new families in a last-ditch attempt at happiness. Joyce Carol Oates is back doing what she does best: the American Dream gone sour.

Now You See Me, by Lesley Glaister (Bloomsbury, £6.99, 281pp)

Lesley Glaister is at her best when describing the intense inner world of the unhinged adolescent, and her ninth book returns to this familiar territory in a story of a young girl with a bag full secrets and nowhere to go. Since leaving home, "Lamb" has drifted up and down the M1 and in and out of hospital. Now working as a cleaning lady, she is camping out in a client's cellar. Then she meets Doggo, a criminal on the run, and is forced to choose between self-protection and the possibility of love. In a novel written in the crisply poetic prose for which she's known, Glaister transforms the bleakest situations into compelling fiction.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro (Vintage, £6.99, 323pp)

Finding that your husband's last message to you – saved from a pyjama pocket by the undertaker – is a daft poem about office politics would unsettle the sanest wife. In these stories, Alice Munro is concerned with the business of leave-taking and the domestic realities that make death such an embarrassing business. Less melancholy than they sound, Munro's masterly stories make you feel you are in safe hands and are undercut with wise words and wry asides. As one old lady notes: "It looked like adventures, but it was all according to script, if you know what I mean."

Late Victorian Holocausts, by Mike Davis (Verso, £14, 464pp)

Historical dynamite, and probably the finest and fiercest indictment of the last era of globalisation ever made. Davis, a maverick Californian scholar, connects the El Niño-related droughts of the late 19th century with the waves of famine that cost up to 50 million lives in India, northern China and Brazil. With as much precision as passion, he shows how colonial control and free-market economics transformed natural emergencies into man-made genocide. In essence, these huge tragedies created the modern "third world". This "black book of liberal capitalism" should become a classic.