This month’s best paperbacks: Jarvis Cocker, Barbara Kingsolver and more | Books

Good Pop, Bad Pop Jarvis Cocker

A life in objects

The first memoir from the former lead singer of Pulp would have been better titled A History of Jarvis in 100 Objects. That’s what it is: an illustrated guide to the things that make Cocker who he is. He doesn’t appear in many of the photos; the great majority show his collection of ephemera: a 20-year-old pack of Wrigley’s Extra gum, a fragment of Imperial Leather soap with its old-style label still attached. That’s him in a nutshell: driven by a lifelong love of the everyday, perceiving romance and poignance in items that others chuck out. It isn’t wrong to say that without this sensibility, there would have been no Pulp, whom he led until 2013, no many-tentacled solo career and consequently no national treasure status.

Caroline Sullivan

£11.04 (RRP £12.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Either/ Or Elif Batuman

Adventures in literature and life

Should one spend one’s brief time on Earth guided by hedonism and pleasure, or by morality and responsibility? The second instalment of Elif Batuman’s chronicle of Selin, a student of Russian literature at Harvard in the 1990s whose biography corresponds fairly closely to the writer’s own, takes as its title Søren Kierkegaard’s first book, which suggests that one must choose whether to live according to ethical or aesthetic principles. For Selin, now in her sophomore year and with an unsatisfactory, perplexing quasi-relationship with mathematics student Ivan apparently behind her, the real issue seems not so much how to make a choice between two starkly opposed systems, but how to start living at all.

Either/Or does not exactly conclude; rather, a third volume seems almost inevitable, given that Selin appears to be leaving Kierkegaard and Breton to one side as she embarks on a reading of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Sex has also entered the frame. Spending her summer updating student guidebooks, Selin seems suddenly struck by the idea that conveying information plainly – “Hearty sandwiches. Hot dishes” – might be just as useful, and indeed truthful, as the greatest literature. From the vantage point of greater age, one might point out that it is not an either/or situation, and perhaps Selin’s further adventures will help her appreciate that.

Alex Clark

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

What the world may be like Hamish McRae

What the world may be like

The financial journalist Hamish McRae has written an insightful survey of what the world may be like in the next 20 to 30 years. An earlier study, published in 1994, attempted the same exercise for 2020 and, according to McRae, foresaw that Brexit was a real possibility, a pandemic was a threat, and that concerns about the environment would become a major issue. He was also “broadly correct” in predicting that in the 2020s the world would be “more prosperous, healthier, better educated and informed, and more peaceful than in the early 1990s or indeed in any previous period of recorded history”. McRae admits that one of his biggest oversights was the social impact of technology. The World Wide Web was not widely available until 1991 and he missed the extraordinary transformation that has occurred by linking computers together, an example of the limitations of crystal ball gazing.

Nevertheless, McRae’s book is wide-ranging and detailed, drawing on an impressive array of data to analyse key global trends, before focusing in on the future prospects for regions and countries. The UK, for example, faces a decade or so of “confusion” after the traumatic Brexit process. But by the 2050s it will, he suggests, be “more confident, more-outward-looking and more prosperous as part of a family of nations linked by language and history – the Anglosphere”. Migrants from around the world will help drive the economic growth needed in the UK, and it will eventually approach Germany both in population and economic size. But to do so it has to reinvent itself, dumping its residual arrogance about its special place in the world and thinking of itself “more as a big Switzerland, not a small United States”.

McRae’s thoughtful and solidly researched long view of global trends is welcome in an age of rolling news and hot takes on social media. He is aware that at a time when public attitudes appear increasingly gloomy, his conclusions may seem too optimistic: “those of us who do sometimes focus on success stories get mocked for our supposedly Panglossian view of the world”. But his book offers an invaluable framework for understanding the serious issues and challenges that will confront us all in the coming years, and perhaps grounds to be hopeful too.

PD Smith

£11.43 (RRP £12.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver

In the spirit of Dickens

Last year in the US, opioids were involved in more than 80,000 overdose deaths, representing yet another hike in an epidemic that began in the mid-1990s and shows no signs of abating. Fury at the now well-documented role big pharma played in its creation ripples through Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel, a hillbilly coming-of-age saga that seizes from its opening line.

“First, I got myself born,” announces its protagonist, Damon Fields – no mean feat given that his addict mother, little more than a child herself, is lying passed out among her pill bottles in a trailer home in Lee County, Virginia.

He grows into a wild boy with red hair inherited from the dead father he never knew, and before long the nickname “Demon Copperhead” has stuck. “You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it,” he observes, and so does his voice, summoning in its singularity the likes of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield while hailing from a very different demographic.

With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale – Dickensian, you might say, and Kingsolver does indeed describe Demon Copperhead as a contemporary adaptation of David Copperfield. That novel provides her epigraph: “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

Hephzibah Anderson

£8.49 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Nightcrawling Leila Mottley

A dazzling debut

Based on a true crime in 2015 involving institutional exploitation, brutality and corruption in the Oakland police department, Leila Mottley’s Nightcrawling was longlisted for the 2022 Booker prize. The young American’s debut novel gives voice to 17-year-old Kiara Johnson, who, after her father’s death and mother’s detention in a rehab facility, becomes a sex worker to pay for rent hikes. She also needs to look after her disillusioned older brother Marcus, who spends his time on music, and Trevor, a nine-year-old left behind by a neighbour. Drugs, sex and power struggles are a familiar premise from television dramas such as The Wire. What makes Nightcrawling scarring and unforgettable as a novel is Mottley’s ability to change our language about and perception of the repressed and confined.

In a novel where racism is everywhere, Mottley uses anonymity to chilling effect. The police officers are referred to by their badge numbers – 612, 190, 601. Their names are disclosed only towards the very end. But against the insidious hidden forces of institutional and social corruption, Mottley sings the inner experiences of the body: “The things your body needs most don’t usually make sense”; “Sex feels no different from an insistent punch to my gut”; “I exited that courtroom with a different body”. Restlessly truth-seeking, Nightcrawling marks the dazzling arrival of a young writer with a voice and vision you won’t easily get out of your head.

Kit Fan

£8.36 (RRP £8.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Hurricane Season Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes

Intense and inventive

A structurally inventive murder mystery set in a lawless Mexican village rife with superstition, Fernanda Melchor’s formidable English-language debut takes the form of eight torrential paragraphs ranging from one to 64 pages long.

It opens in a blizzard of gossip related to the discovery of the corpse of a notorious local woman known as the Witch, who provided abortions for sex workers serving the nearby oil industry and whose rundown mansion – a venue for raucous parties – was said to hold a stash of gold eyed up by everyone from down-at-heel gigolos to venal cops on the take.

In vigorous, earthy language (Sophie Hughes’s resourceful translation raids US and British slang for what you guess must be a pretty creative repertoire of curses and epithets), we’re plunged into the chaotic lives of several villagers in the Witch’s orbit, including druggy layabout Luismi, seen leaving her home the morning her body was found; his pal Brando, tormented by secret lust; and his lover, Norma, a 13-year-old runaway carrying her stepfather’s baby.

Melchor has said that she originally conceived of Hurricane Season as a nonfiction investigation, à la Truman Capote, of a real‑life murder that took place in a village near her hometown of Veracruz, changing tack once she reconsidered the hazards of poking around a narco-inhabited locale as a stranger. If she has any ethical doubts about the project, she keeps them to herself; this is fiction with the brakes off.

Anthony Cummins

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Lapvona Ottessa Moshfegh

A carnival of the grotesque

There’s something encouraging, and perhaps telling, about Ottessa Moshfegh’s success. Her abject, pervy, excremental fictions carry a whiff of deviance and nihilism into a squeaky clean mainstream that comforts some while alienating others. Although it was set before the horrors of web 2.0, her hugely popular novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation seemed to reflect something of the medicated, desolate, anaesthetised now. While our era’s ruling cultural-literary tone decrees “It’s the end of the world – no laughing”, Moshfegh’s stuff is comically weird, amoral and antisocial.

Lapvona is not her first novel to eschew the contemporary world – her debut, McGlue, was set aboard a 19th-century pirate ship – yet its blurred medieval setting, like a recounted dream of a half-forgotten past, feels like a bold swerve. As I began reading I kept asking myself: “What’s she up to? What skin has she got in this game?” Three hundred pages later, I still didn’t fully have my answers, though by then I’d realised that the (pseudo) historical setting wrenches us out of history and into a timeless, interior landscape of drives, impulses and cravings. A crowd of first name-only characters trace the play of instinct and appetite amid a cheerfully undignified, infantile realm wherein morality either operates in some alien manner or isn’t there at all. Lapvona’s grotesque, shameless world shows us not how it used to be, but how it’s always been.

Rob Doyle

£9.29 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

The Bullet That Missed Richard Osman

Sleuthing sequel

The Thursday Murder Club – Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim – is back. This time round, Richard Osman’s “four harmless pensioners” are investigating the case of Bethany Waites, a television reporter who was looking into a huge VAT fraud when her car was driven off a cliff in the middle of the night and whose body was never found.

The Bullet That Missed is the third outing for Osman’s retirees. Its predecessors, The Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice, sold millions of copies around the world. Any publisher would be keen for Osman to press on with the series after such record-breaking success – The Man Who Died Twice sold an astonishing 114,202 hardbacks in the UK in its first three days last year. And it is easy to be cynical about Osman’s success as an author – he was, after all, the well-known co-host of the hugely popular Pointless TV quiz when his debut came out and his publisher will have thrown enough money behind the novel to guarantee it a place in the book charts.

But that cynicism can only go so far, because once you read Osman’s funny, warm-hearted novels, it is hard not to be charmed by the eccentricities and the resourcefulness of his creations. If you pick up The Bullet That Missed expecting a dark crime novel, gruesome deaths and buckets of jeopardy, you will be disappointed. But you would also be a bit silly, because that’s not what these books set out to be. Their impetus doesn’t come from solving the crime or escaping from danger – it comes from enjoying the Thursday Murder Club (and especially Joyce, who is obviously the best of them) deal with everything that’s thrown in their path with panache and aplomb, be it cryptocurrencies or hitmen.

Alison Flood

£8.49 (RRP £9.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Honey & Spice Bolu Babalola

Playful campus romcom

From the author of the bestselling short story collection Love in Colour comes this funny and charming debut novel, a university romcom geared towards young adult readers who like a touch of snark with their love stories. The plot of Honey & Spice is simple: Kiki is a self-controlled, ambitious and intelligent heroine who prides herself on being able to see through charming seducers, play them at their own game and emerge emotionally unscathed. One day, however, she meets a new student called Malakai. Handsome, clever, secure and nice, he must be too good to be true. Or is he exactly what he seems – and just what she needs?

Kiki makes for an entertaining narrator and the novel’s countless witty lines come mainly from her inner monologue. As the book opens, she is fleeing after a one-night stand with a fellow student who fancies himself as the campus Casanova but whose “50-thread count sheet scratched against my calves”. He embraces her cheesily in front of a mirror: “It only took a few seconds for his eyes to flit from me, from us, to his own reflection. His bottom lip had tucked in. It was honestly like a very uncomfortable threesome where two people were way more into each other than they were you.”

Immediately after this, Kiki meets Malakai and the real engine of the novel starts up. The story often drifts into a heavily Americanised snap’n’sass sitcom register, which sits oddly with its UK redbrick university setting, while the general descriptions, reported actions and exchanges between characters can be strained and clunky. However, the central couple have a beguiling sweetness and Babalola skilfully imbues their scenes with a tender innocence that is romantic.

Bidisha

£8.36 (RRP £8.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Original Sins Matt Rowland Hill

A propulsive memoir

Nothing about Original Sins, Matt Rowland Hill’s memoir and first book, should work. Or rather, it should work, but in such a smooth-grooved, unsurprising, seen-it-all-before way that it would fail to stir much excitement. Stuffed in here is every trope of the memoir boom from the past 15 years. First comes the story of middle-class drug addiction, as Hill’s promising young life is reduced to waiting in scary inner-city parks for a boy in a hoodie to drop off a wicked little packet. Then there is the oppressively evangelical upbringing – Hill is the son of a Welsh Baptist minister and his equally zealous wife, whose idea of fun is denouncing Darwin and shouting bits of scripture at each other in the car. And then there’s the fish-out-of-water angle, when Hill gets a scholarship from his state comprehensive to a famous school (never named but easily sourced online and it really is a properly famous one, with penguin suits, fagging and Latin prep). And finally there’s the title, Original Sins, which is hardly original.

And yet, despite all the deja vu, this book is brilliant. The writing shimmers off the page, so that the night sweats are sweatier, the Bible stuff more granular and the class angle queasier than anything you will have read before. Put them all together, add lashings of humour and lacerating candour, and you have a propulsive book – and an informative one too.

Kathryn Hughes

£9.67 (RRP £10.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Life Ceremony Sayaka Murata

What does it mean to be normal?

Life Ceremony is made up of 13 stories by the Japanese author Sayaka Murata who became an international bestseller with Convenience Store Woman. Picking up on themes in her novel Earthlings, most of these stories are about alienation, exploring what it means to be “normal” through a close focus on characters, nearly always women, who do not conform to social expectations. In the title story, the narrator remembers that when she was a child, it was forbidden to eat human flesh, and wonders why no one questions the present tradition of marking every death with a ritual in which the flesh of the deceased is cooked and eaten. In the even more disturbing Puzzle, Sanae is considered by her workmates to be an exceptionally kind and empathic person, but feels herself to be something more like a building or a machine, not a life form at all, despite her yearnings to be like the people around her. The author’s plain, clear, observational style makes the stories strangely believable, easy to read and hard to forget.

Lisa Tuttle

£8.36 (RRP £8.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop

Murder in a Heatwave Edited by Cecily Gayford

Detectives in summer

The latest addition to Profile’s Vintage Murder series – seasonal anthologies of Golden Age crime fiction curated by Cecily Gayford – is an excellent collection of ten stories set in the sweltering heat of the summer. These gripping whodunits feature some of the greatest fictional sleuths of all time, from Sherlock Holmes to John Rebus.

In The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, Holmes is summoned from Baker Street on “a blazing hot day in August” to Croydon, south of London, in order to explain why a retired “maiden lady of fifty” has received a parcel containing two severed human ears. It’s a grim mystery, the solution to which causes Holmes to ask “what object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear?” Sadly, even the world’s most famous detective cannot answer this profound question.

Ian Rankin’s A Good Hanging also takes place in August, during the Edinburgh Festival, which Rebus – suffering from an unseasonal cold – doesn’t enjoy: “there seemed a despair about all the artistic fervour and, of course, the crime rate rose”. In this case, he and Detective Constable Brian Holmes are called to solve the mystery of why an actor has been found hanging from a scaffold in Parliament Square. It’s a tragic crime, one in which a knowledge of Shakespeare rather than forensics turns out to be crucial.

There are also great stories featuring Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, playing his usual “bally-fool-with-an-eyeglass tricks”, the donnish Oxford detective Sir John Appleby created by Michael Innes, Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion, and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, a private detective who is a lover of orchids and an unashamedly obese gourmand – hence his preference for solving mysteries from the comfort of his own Manhattan home.

Rankin’s story is from 1992 and Conan Doyle’s from 1893, so the collection spans an impressive chronological range. For readers interested in the history of the genre, it would have been nice to include dates of publication and perhaps a brief biographical note on each author. But despite that, this is a hugely enjoyable anthology, perfect for a lazy summer’s afternoon.

PD Smith

£8.36 (RRP £8.99) – Purchase at the Guardian bookshop