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Monday 26 June 2017

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Pick of the Paperbacks

Conspicuous consumption, Jah Wobble and Irvine Welsh all feature among the best new paperbacks

Must Have By Geoffrey Miller. Vintage, £8.99

Why are we prepared to pay a premium for BMWs, Hermès bags and Rolex watches? Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist with a witty writing style, explains that marketers have convinced us they are effective ways of flaunting our desirability to prospective friends and partners. Unfortunately, for the conspicuous consumer, Miller says we overestimate how much other people care about our possessions, and that in the end attractiveness is determined solely by intelligence and personality. Ruth Caven

Howard’s End is on the Landing By Susan Hill. Profile, £8

The novelist spends a year re-reading books she has loved. She reminisces about happy days in the London Library in the 1960s as well as encounters with literary figures from TS Eliot through Bruce Chatwin and WH Auden. Hill, who is also a publisher, offers opinionated reading tips and advocates 'slow reading’. Unabashedly conservative, she eschews the 'wretched e-reader’. Katie Owen

Memoirs of a Geezer By Jah Wobble. Serpent’s Tail, £8.99

Two years after leaving the post-punk band Public Image Limited, their former bassist, then a recovering alcoholic and London Underground guard, announced over the PA system, 'I used to be somebody, I repeat, I used to be somebody.’ With the same candour, wit and eloquence, Wobble gives us his story (East End kid becomes musician via colourful antics) alongside a vivid account of Britain’s turbulent cultural and political recent past. Lucinda Everett

Reheated Cabbage By Irvine Welsh. Vintage, £8.99

Irvine Welsh is an acquired taste, but if you have not acquired the taste yet, there could be no better place to start than this sparkling collection of stories, as diverse as they are incisive. Black humour, gritty realism and inventive phrase-making run through the book like threads of good-class Scottish tweed. I am Miami, with which the book ends, makes a fine coda to Glue, with the characters from that groundbreaking novel comically – and touchingly – reunited on the other side of the world. Sally Cousins

The Anthologist By Nicholson Baker. Pocket Books, £7.99

If you love poetry, but feel slightly embarrassed about your passion, then you will adore this wry, clever novel by the ever-ingenious Nicholson Baker. Paul Chowder, the hero, is a very minor poet indeed, who has just been ditched by his girlfriend: he takes consolation in ruminating on poets past, clinging to his conviction that poetry still matters. There are some delightfully erudite passages about such B-list Victorian rhymesters as Swinburne. SC

Astonishing Splashes of Colour By Clare Morrall. Tindall Street, £7.99

'I can’t decide which is worse, not to have a mother, or not to have children. An empty space in both directions.’ Despite her despair, Kitty’s narrative is full of energy and colour, as she portrays her relationship with her four brothers, her artist father and her semi-detached husband. This Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel gathers force as Kitty’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, and family secrets start to emerge. KO

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