Paperbacks: Not the End of the World<br></br>Saints of Big Harbour<br></br>The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me<br></br>The Resurrectionists<br></br>Regime Change
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Your support makes all the difference.Not the End of the World Kate Atkinson (Black Swan, £6.99, 332pp)
Kate Atkinson's short stories, her first collection after three novels, will be a disappointment if you don't like the kind of short fiction that ends in sudden death or cosmic metamorphosis. Her characters might start off in the real world, but it's not long before they're sprouting wings, cavorting with dolphins, or spontaneously combusting
Most of the twelve stories are set in contemporary Edinburgh, but all are touched by classical mythology. The funniest story in the book ,"Tunnel of Fish", describes the relationship between a gormless eight-year old boy and his harassed mother. June hopes her son's eccentricities - a mouth hanging always ajar like a "dull-witted amphibian" and the bulging eyes of a haddock - are the result of genetics rather than haphazard parenting. It emerges over the course of the story that his underwater conception during a holiday in Crete may have something to do with his slippery persona. The story "Unseen Translation" in which an unconventional nanny "Missy" (think Artemis), acquires glittery sandals and a quiver of silver arrows,also owes its best punch lines to the Ancients.
Atkinson's comic fantasies, funny as they are, are not among her most convincing pieces. It's when she writes about life's more classical tragedies that her real talents as a writer take centre stage. This is a divinely inspired set of stories, but Atkinson fans will be justified in feeling they are not the real thing.
Saints of Big Harbour by Lynn Coady (Vintage, £6.99, 416pp)
In recent years the drizzly island of Cape Breton has had more than its fair share of literary attention. Alistair MacLeod and Ann Marie MacDonald have both set novels there, and now Lynn Coady follows suit with a distinctly unromantic story of small-town Nova Scotia. Guy Boucher is a fatherless teenager, oppressed by boredom. Bullied at home, spurned by his peers, he becomes fixated on a pretty and popular classmate. Tragedy and misunderstanding follow. A convincingly laconic portrait of life in "Nowheresville", where the most excited anyone gets is a Fargo-esque "Yah".
The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me by Suzanne Kingsbury (Vintage, £6.99, 304pp)
Shallow graves, mint juleps, loopy wives - Suzanne Kingsbury has no shame in appropriating the more sizzling cliches of Southern melodrama. Set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Houser Banks, this steamy story of teenage love and racial hatred rumbles with distant foreboding. "It's the things that happen to you which no one else knows about that make you important in life," says the novel's narrator, a bored 16-year old, witness to a murder and knee deep in romance. The familiar cast includes black maid, mammie Shelby, and Judge Greel, the Atticus-like voice of small town integrity.
The Resurrectionists by Michael Collins (Phoenix, £6.99, 360pp)
Irish writer Michael Collins did an impressive job, in his Booker-shortlisted novel The Keepers of Truth, of capturing the rhythms and vernacular of mid-America. His follow-up, while just as convincing on diner etiquette, fails to pull any emotional punches. A man returns home to a small town in Michigan to face his past. Thirty years before, Frank's parents died in a house fire. Now his uncle is dead too, shot by a mysterious stranger. Unfortunately everyone else in the town is also dead, if only from the inside out - destabilised by debt, Vietnam and Korea, and the wintry weather. A novel in hibernation.
Regime Change by Christopher Hitchens (Penguin, £5.99, 104pp)
Some journalists have to wait decades before their choicest cuts become a proper book; the Hitch makes the move within weeks. This slim vol collects his pieces on Iraq from November 2002 to April 2003. Left-leaning belligerents who need their sinews stiffened by his radical case for war on Saddam will find plenty of muscle here. Sceptics will notice that Hitch now routinely adopts the sneery, smug and coarse tone of hard-right shock-jocks - or even The Sun (eg, principled opposition to war over here becomes "European elites having a cow"). Would his idol Orwell have stooped so low?
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