Recent paperbacks

James Hughes-Onslow

Innocent Blood P.D. James (Sphere pp. 313, £1.50). An adopted child seeks her real parents, hoping to find them in circumstances that will confirm fantasies about her noble birth. Her search for identity leads to a rude shock. She meets someone else who is looking for her parents — for very different reasons.

How I Became Holy Mother, and other stories Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (Penguin pp. 268, £2,50). What it's like being an English-educated Pole married to an Indian. Mrs Jhabvala's love-hate stories about India are based on her own experience. Europeans and Indians never quite absorb each other's culture but can't escape

each other's influence. Claustrophobic, compassionate, comic and sad. A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Took (King Penguin pp. 338, £2.50). A Pulitzer Prizewinner but the author killed himself, having failed to get this book published. An early Sixties, New Orleans tragicomedy. Ignatius Reilly, a highly intelligent slob hero who hates American society, is occasionally made to work by his mother and at one point organises a black uprising in a jean factory.

Ernest Sevin: Unskilled Labourer and

World Statesman Mark Stephens. (A TGWU publication pp. 136 £0.95), Our hero became first General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and finally cornerstone of the Attlee government. Hard-working, loyal and ruthlessly decisive. Moss Evans's publishing venture (it's for Bevin's centenary) reminds us that they don't make them like that any more. Puff Ball Fay Weldon (Coronet pp. 272, £1.40). Having a baby and living in the country. A woman's eternal battle with her insides and no gynaecological details spared. The mysteriously

growing puff ball is her idea of pregnancy, and with the help of the herbalist witch next door she becomes more preoccupied with her body than with her husband.

Keaton, the man who wouldn't lie down Tom Dardis (Penguin pp. 340, £2.50). The master of silent films in the Twenties, Buster Keaton was forgotten in the Thirties but is now recognised as a genius as great as Chaplin. A shy and serious man, he made his slapstick films with meticulous precision and historical accuracy. Illustrated with new photographs from Keaton's files.

The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. George Steiner (Faber pp. 126, £2,95), Hitler is alive (in his nineties) and living in the Amazon jungle. And the ex-Fuhrer has polished up his theories since he wrote Mein Kampf.

The Lake of Darkness Ruth Rendell (Arrow pp. 201, £1.10). Winner of the Arts Council's Genre Fiction prize. Like the rest of us Miss Rendell shows an unhealthy interest in psychopaths and pools winners. Martin Urban wants to use his £100,000 prize to help deprived citizens — but this gets him caught up with some very devious and dangerous people.

A Very Private Life Michael Frayn (Fontana pp. 192, £1.35) Once upon a time in the good new days a long, long time ahead. A fantasy fable from the future. Cumby lives in a sealed house where all human behaviour is controlled by pills and where they communicate by dialling the outside world on 3-D holovision, But one day she makes contact with a real person . . .

Wheels Within Wheels Dervla Murphy (Penguin pp. 236, £1.50). Readers of Full Tilt, her bicycle trip to India, have been wondering why Miss Murphy was daft enough to try it but sensible enough to carry it out. This account of her eccentric childhood in Waterford looking after her crippled mother explains it all. She was a secret cyclist and writer at the age of ten, when she planned her travels.

Dunkirk: the Necessary Myth Nicholas Harman (Coronet pp. 300, £1.95). A triumph or a disaster? A betrayal of the French or a deliverance for Europe? Some say it's not cricket reopening this can of worms but there were few contemporary reports, other than propaganda, and after 40 years this could be the last chance of a detached assessment with the help of eyewitnesses.

Shout! The True Story of the Beatles Philip Norman (Elm Tree pp. 400, £5.95), High life or low life, Mr Norman stays with the Beatles through Liverpool, Hamburg, London, India and America. Diligently researched and imaginatively written. With observations on the era of Kennedy, Profumo, Swinging London, Gurus and Vietnam, it's not just for ageing Beatlemaniacs.

Polities is for People Shirley Williams (Penguin pp. 216, £2.50). How to please some of the people. The reflections of. an ex-minister with time to think, and a first blast from the Social Democrats. No easy rhetoric but a catalogue of complexities facing middle-of-the-road politicians. How unemployment might be reduced if overtime were banned. And how it might not. Why private schools must go, excellent as they are. A radical break from two-party politics? Or an old-fashioned compromise?

The Yawning Heights Alexander Zinoviev (Penguin pp. 829,14.95). 'A harder book to read than to write', Zinoviev said on telly last month. He is probably right. Powerful satire about life in the Soviet Union based on long and bitter experience, systematically lampooning every aspect of society from bureaucracy to black markets. Even more incisive than Solzhenitsyn and a good deal funnier when you get into it.