Paperbacks: So Many Ways to Begin Newton Alentejo Blue I Fought the Law 'A Breathless Hush...' The MCC anthology of Cricket Verse Me:Moir Volume One

So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor (BLOOMSBURY £7.99)

McGregor's second novel begins with a brief prologue. Mary, an Irish girl in domestic service in London during the Second World War, becomes pregnant and has her baby in secret. The child is adopted and Mary returns to Ireland, has four children, but never stops waiting for "some long-lost, solemn-eyed child to come calling across the water and tell her where he'd been gone all this time".

The story then shifts to the protagonist, David Carter, going home to his wife, Eleanor, after attending her mother's funeral. She has been baking while her mother was being buried and the atmosphere is tense; the couple clearly have issues well beyond the vast amount of cakes and biscuits piling up in the kitchen. And why hasn't Eleanor been to the funeral herself? This is how McGregor writes, intricately mapping the ways in which relationships are coloured by characters from the past.

A museum curator, Carter has since childhood built up stories based on collections of generally mundane artefacts: postcards, tobacco tins, the kinds of items listed here as chapter titles. The best moment of his career was piecing together a successful exhibition about post-war Coventry, bringing together all kinds of items to evoke a particular point in time. It's his own life he can't make sense of, especially not after learning that a major detail from his past was a lie. This is a wonderful novel; low-key but beautifully paced, scattered with extraordinarily intense moments.

Newton by Peter Ackroyd (VINTAGE £7.99)

Born on Christmas day 1642, Isaac Newton was so sickly that two women sent to fetch things for him idled for a while, sure he'd be dead by the time they got back. From these humble roots ("When on occasion we observe the taciturnity and even surliness of Newton, we may recognise the habits of the Lincolnshire farming stock"), he rose to become the one scientist most people have heard of.

Ackroyd's biography does a tremendous job of making this austere, curmudgeonly figure appealing. The Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687 and containing the principle of universal gravitation and Newton's laws of motion was apparently rendered deliberately abstruse so Newton could avoid being "baited by little Smatterers in Mathematicks". He clashed with the German mathematician and philosopher Leibniz who believed that he, rather than Newton, had invented calculus. Eventually Leibniz asked the Royal Society to adjudicate - a big mistake since all of its members had been chosen by Newton, its president, who wrote the final report stating: "We reckon Mr Newton the first inventor." It really did seem that Newton considered himself to be "God's appointed, beyond reproof or reproach".

Newton's interests extended way outside conventional science, into astrology, the occult and alchemy. He was also Master of the Royal Mint and MP for Cambridge University. This book may be short, but somehow it never seems to compromise the immense scope of his life and achievements.

Alentejo Blue by Monica Ali (BLACK SWAN £7.99)

Set in a rural Portuguese village, Monica Ali's second novel offers a series of interwoven vignettes tapping into the lives of its diverse inhabitants, some of them just passing through. It's an interesting project, the overall aim being to try and capture the town's real spirit.

Some of the characters are marvellously drawn, showing why Ali is such a highly regarded writer. There's Vasco, for example, a local man "building a wall of fat to conceal his deep, deep sadness". He spent several years in America, where he married and learned the restaurant business. After his wife's tragic death he returned to Portugal, where he now runs a humdrum café, growing ever fatter as he reflects on everyone who's wronged him, starting with his grandmother, who by pretending she never grumbled turned her whole life into a complaint. Other memorable locals are an old gay farmer who finds his long-time companion has killed himself and Teresa, a young woman who wants to escape the town by going to work in London as an au pair. Among the town's new arrivals are the dysfunctional English Potts family.

It's a pity that this novel doesn't quite succeed. The pace reflects the town's sun-bleached weariness all too accurately; in places the narrative almost seems to stall, uncommitted to another chapter. It could have worked: in Twin Peaks, David Lynch and Mark Frost came up with the device of Laura Palmer's death to carry what's really a very similar kind of story, full of extraordinary characters, feuding, dissatisfied and often longing for escape.

I Fought the Law by Dan Kieran (BANTAM £9.99)

Since Labour came to power the economy has consistently performed well and the shops continue to feed a consumer boom. But what, Kieran asks, about those of us "floundering under the highest levels of debt in Europe... the ones suffering from depression because they can't handle the stress of their jobs". It's a safe bet that most people identify with this - so who, exactly, is benefiting from Britain's economic success? According to Kieran, it's business corporations. This book is about individuals who've taken a stand against the "uniform high streets, no-go estates, monochrome offices and shopping malls of corporate Britain".

He meets a group of picnickers who took to eating in Parliament Square each week; but because their cakes were iced with phrases like "Freedom of Speech", they were arrested on the grounds they were breaking recent legislation not to protest near the Houses of Parliament. In Derby he interviews a woman called Dorothy camping on the roof of a bus station scheduled for demolition to make way for a new shopping centre. Most inspiring of all are his conversations with the writer Chris Yates ("You can have money or you can have time but you can never have both. I've always been happy because I've always chosen time") and the artist, musician and poet Billy Childish ("People don't like moving towards integrity because they are afraid of failure, but failure is what they should be trying to embrace because that shows you your humanity and weakness").

'A Breathless Hush...' The MCC anthology of Cricket Verse ed David Rayvern Allen (METHUEN £14.99)

If you like rhyming verse with a steady metre and you enjoy cricket, you're almost sure to find something you enjoy in this collection. If you just like bonkers poetry, you may also want to dip in. But if your tastes are cutting edge and you have a fear of jaunty rhyming couplets, steer well clear. It's difficult to know how else to introduce a collection that pitches work such as Owen Seaman's "A Missionary Game" ("No Viking, landing from his ships, / Was ever captured in the slips; / No Irish heathen learned the hat-trick, / Though freely coached by good St Patrick") up against Ted Hughes's "Sunstruck" ("The freedom of Saturday afternoons / Starched to cricket dazzle, nagged at a theorem - / Shaggy valley parapets / Pending like thunder, narrowing the spin-bowler's angle.").

A conservative streak continues to run through cricket, from the Long Room at Lord's to village grounds up and down the country. Take the poem "Ladies' Cricket, As You Know" by "A gallant Anglo-Indian poet": "Ladies' cricket, as you know, / Now-a-days is all the go ... Her sash I'd knot with taste / Round her dainty little waist..." I can think of several women cricketers who could tell the poet where to stick his sash.

But there aren't too many examples like this. Try finding the patrician streak in Dorothy Spring's "Slip-Up from Somerset": "A cricketer Lord's-bound from Yeovil / Turned up by mistake at the Eovil; / So he said 'Never worry,' / And batted for Surrey, / Though this met with some Disappreovil."

Me:Moir Volume One by Vic Reeves (VIRGIN £8.99)

Vic Reeves's wittily titled memoir is exactly what you'd expect: a farrago of bizarre and amusing memories not necessarily restrained by the truth. After revealing that he ballooned to ten stone by the age of three months following a midwife's advice that he should be fed Complan, and that his sister was born in the coal shed, he points out: "That is the way I choose to imagine the scene, so let that be an end to it." If only all memoirists were so honest.

Fortunately the book never really tumbles into outright absurdity. The odd Complan moment aside, it's the way Reeves revels in smaller bizarre details that make it so special. As a boy, for example, he had a fixation with owning a pet bird like his friend Peter Collins did. "Will it attack us?" he asked Collins during his first encounter with the beast, a beady-eyed crow, perched on a shelf in the boy's garage. "Only if I give it the command," his friend replied. Later, he became enamoured with a kestrel regularly to be seen perched on the shoulder of a local scooter-riding mod.

It's striking how early on in life the tone of Reeves's comedy became established. In his first year at secondary school he and his friend Rod regularly rolled around howling with laughter at the catchphrases they adopted, deliberately winding up pupils who weren't in on the joke. Anyone who remembers being reduced to helpless laughter watching Vic Reeves' Big Night Out while those around them grasped for ways to bitch about how unfunny the TV show was will know the same feeling.

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