PAPERBACKS

Goodbye Lucille By Segun Afolabi VINTAGE Pounds 7.99 (312pp)

In his stylish short-story collection, A Life Elsewhere, Nigerian- born Segun Afolabi wrote memorably about life as a newly-arrived asylum seeker. In Goodbye Lucille, his debut novel, he returns to questions of identity and ethnicity - this time round viewing the world through the eyes of a navel-gazing expat. Vincent, the novel's narrator, is an overweight black freelance photographer who has recently left Kentish Town for Berlin. It's 1985 and, seduced by the city's nightlife, he fritters away his evenings in the company of misfits and chancers, and his days snacking and avoiding work. Not content with his lot, he craves intimacy but can't summon up the requisite energy to commit either to his Seychelloise girlfriend, Lucille, or the many available women who come across his path.

As the novel expands - and the summer hots up - a series of familial crises provokes Vincent to review his troubled past and early years as an adopted child. He complains of moving from "predicament to predicament", but as he meanders from bed to dance- floor to bar, it's hard not to agree with Lucille that he needs to get a grip. Afolabi's interest in the depressed and delusional should make for grim reading, but his supple prose and plain- speaking characters make this portrait of party-time Berlin an unexpectedly involving read. EH

Ferney

By James Long

SPHERE 7.99 (466pp)

First published 10 years ago, James Long's indecently escapist love story was such a word-of-mouth success that copies were exchanged on Amazon for 85. As in all good fantasies, a beautiful house lies at the heart of the book - a derelict cottage in deepest Somerset where newly-weds Mike and Gally Martin have just started work on a long-cherished grand design. Their happiness seems complete, but then Gally meets Ferney, a surprisingly fit octogenarian who seems to hold more attraction for her than her academically inclined husband. Long's unpretentiously told time- slippage romance is played out against a bewitchingly bucolic setting. EH

Sepulchre

By Kate Mosse

ORION 7.99 (739pp)

For anyone who religiously avoids novels about blood-lines, the occult and ecclesiastical manuscripts the window for escape is closing. Even blockbusters aimed at women are no longer a conspiracy- free zone. After the commercial success of her 2005 novel Labyrinth, Kate Mosse returns to France for a story of fin-de-sicle phantoms and buried treasure. Told as a dual narrative, the novel moves between the 1890s and the present day, as two young women, centuries apart, try to unlock the secrets of a set of tarot cards with associations to Rennes-les-Bains, the village at the heart of The Da Vinci Code. The walls dividing the past and the present, the living and the dead, prove to be dangerously thin. EH

The Mesmerist

By Barbara Ewing

SPHERE 7.99 (388pp)

Mesmerism was all the rage in 19th-century London, and in her fourth novel Barbara Ewing imagines life for a female practitioner in this very male world. Cordelia Preston is an ageing actress who, fed up with being typecast as an old crone, sets up shop as a hypnotist in a Bloomsbury basement. A natural at the art of suggestion, she's at the height of her powers when she is implicated in a series of unsolved murders. A compelling storyteller, Ewing puts on a masterly performance in recreating Victorian theatreland. Even when the body count starts to mount, she keeps us believing in an increasingly unlikely train of events. EH

Palestine

Ed. David & Helen Constantine

MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION 11 (182pp)

Always a cosmopolitan feast of poetry and commentary, MPT embraces Palestine - from every angle - and typically delivers revelations, not reinforcements. David Constantine sets the tone with an essay-editorial that gathers fragments of insight instead of trumpeting a party line. Commanding poetry of witness and exile from the Palestinians Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim stands beside lyricism and longing from Israelis such as Dvora Amir and Rivka Miriam. The bilingual (Hebrew-Arabic) poet Salman Masalha further enriches this divided soil. MPT picks a crop to savour from a land where, as Tal Nitzan puts it, "love is tied to nightmare". BT

Provided You Don't Kiss Me

By Duncan Hamilton

HARPERPENNIAL 8.99 (281pp)

Duncan Hamilton's greatest achievement in this story of his "20 years with Brian Clough" is in conveying why the hard-drinking, unpredictable, foul-mouthed manager was so likeable. He deftly recalls the beautiful game, 1970s-style, and a man who wouldn't recognise its 21st-century equivalent. It is such a tender depiction of Clough and his demons - this must be some bloke version of love. KG

Dancing in the Streets

By Barbara Ehrenreich

GRANTA 8.99 (320pp)

From the ritual ecstasies of ancient Greece through the testifying frenzy of Black churches to rock festivals and the samba schools of Rio, this history and celebration of "collective joy" sings with the spirit of the carnival. For Ehrenreich, a peaceful riot of our own not only keeps us together and thumbs a nose at power. It banishes the blues: Protestant clampdowns on party-time made Northern latitudes depressed. Someone give Boris a copy now. BT

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