THE WAY TO PARADISE
By Mario Vargas LLosa
Faber, £7.99

Paul Gauguin, the post-Impressionist who came to painting late after a brief and successful career in finance, who stayed in the Yellow House in Arles with Van Gogh, and who lit out for Tahiti in the hope of founding a Utopian artistic community, is a novelist’s dream. Vargas Llosa, however, delivers a masterstroke by making his novel the story of two lives. One is Gauguin, concentrating on the period from his first Tahitian expedition in 1891 to his death in 1903; the other is Flora Tristán, the painter’s half-Peruvian grandmother, who in 1844 undertakes a tour of French cities, agitating for social reform as the representative of the Workers’ Union. Both seek paradise, albeit by radically different methods, and it is Vargas Llosa’s great achievement that he so skilfully penetrates not only these two figures but the idealist mindset in general.

DREAMS NEVER END
Edited by Nicholas Royle
Tindal Street, £7.99

These are ten stories by three youngish authors. Andrew Newsham shows promise, although his American-set pieces are tonally a little awkward. Mick Scully, who is building up a grimy universe around the Little Moscow, a hangout for Birmingham toughs, impresses, as does H. P. Tinker, especially with the hilarious deadpan surrealism of his The Shattered Window.

THE GRANDMOTHERS
By Doris Lessing
Perennial, £7.99

There are passages in this collection of four novellas (or long short stories) that equal Lessing’s best. There are also longueurs. But ploughing through them is not the chore that it might be. Perhaps this is because when Lessing hits her stride, as she does most majestically in the central section of her wartime love story, A Love Child, one is quick to forget such plodding.

BERLIN BLUES
By Sven Regener
Vintage, £6.99

West Berliner Frank Lehmann, rapidly approaching his 30th birthday in November 1989, holds in high regard “anyone capable of getting enthusiastic about anything”. Working as a barman, he is a rarity in that he finds the weightless drift of twentysomething ennui agreeable. Regener’s novel, a delicate mixture of pathos and laugh-aloud moments, evokes late-1980s Kreuzberg to a T.

THE BEQUEST
By John de Falbe
Vintage, £7.99

De Falbe’s novel of the mid-19th century courtship and marriage of Emmie MacArthur and Frederik Ziege is an imagining of his own forebears. The novel’s tone is of a seemingly Jamesian sensibility which partially disguises the less artistic processes of a genealogist. The book is more literal than literary, but its elegance affords distinct pleasure.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

THE LOST AMAZON
By Wade Davis
Thames & Hudson, £18.95

In 1941, the enthnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes disappeared into the Amazon rainforest and didn’t come out again for 12 years. When he reappeared at Harvard, it was with 30,000 botanical specimens, many of them unknown to modern medical science. Schultes became known as the guy you went to when you wanted to know about magic mushrooms, and about Yagé and LSD, which he found in common use among tribes of the northwest Amazon of Colombia. He hadn’t hesitated to try the toxic, hallucinogenic substances himself, so he spoke with an authority deeply informed by the native lore, wit and experiments of the tribes who had taught him about many medicinal herbs that have contributed greatly to modern pharmacology. The text of this tribute book is basically a Schultes taster: it prefaces and comments on a ravishing selection of the photographs he took with a 1927 twin-lens Rolleiflex — about 10,000 pictures in all, of plants, people, rivers and fantastical landscapes. It’s a beautiful book — a haunting record of a lost world.

SIGNS & WONDERS
By Marina Warner
Vintage, £8.99

This dizzying, dazzling anthology of Marina Warner’s essays expresses her “consistent interest in the cross-fertilisation of literature, belief and society, and in the interwovenness of cultural, aesthetic and political values”. That’s not a sentence most English critics and novelists could truthfully write (even those who could get their heads round it at all).

THE SHADOW OF A NATION
By Nick Clarke
Phoenix, £8.99

Clarke does not hold television responsible “for the changes in society in recent years, but it is, literally, the medium through which we can detect what is happening to us”. In this despairing analysis of Britain since the 1950s, the careers of six totemic figures are examined for significance in the celebrity age. What are these people for? Not much, says Clarke.

ARUNDHATI ROY: The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile
Conversations with Arundhati Roy by David Barsamian
Harper Perennial, £8.99

Barsamian describes Roy as “a sparkplug of ideas, imagination and good cheer” because, despite the serious global and national issues she addresses, she is fast with a telling phrase, feisty in her campaigns against corruption, and prepared to mix it with the authorities even at risk of being jailed.

THE FABER POCKET GUIDE TO BALLET
By Deborah Bull & Luke Jennings
Faber, £7.99

Jennings has compiled thumbnail plot summaries, short critical commentaries and brief historical contexts for ballets from the Romantic of the 1830s to the post- modern. Bull adds a personal commentary (the icing on the sugar plum) on roles she has danced in the classical and modern repertoire.

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