Paperbacks: What it Takes to Be HumanThe Act of Roger Murgatroyd: An EntertainmentAre You With Me?Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to IndiaThe Longest Pub Crawl

What it Takes to Be Human, by Marilyn Bowering (Maia £8.99)

Sandy Grey's father is the kind of Christian preacher who believes you can wash away someone's sins with a stiff brush and soap – as long as you scrub until they bleed. Set in Canada after the outbreak of the Second World War, this haunting, intense novel begins with 19-year-old Grey being committed to an asylum for the criminally insane after apparently attacking his father with a tyre jack.

Inside the asylum Grey is treated kindly by the well-meaning Dr Frank, whose devotion to psychoanalysis means that Grey avoids the drugs and surgery that have wrecked the minds of many other inmates. As time passes, however, Dr Frank comes under pressure to obtain measurable results, and Grey suffers. Little details spell out the way the institutional ethos starts to shift – the disappearance of Frank's books on Jung, for example.

Grey makes friends, such as Karl, a pacifist German writer who was locked up for setting free caged birds when war was declared. He also makes powerful enemies, such as Cooper, a bigoted attendant whose unrestrained violence twice changes the course of Grey's life.

Karl tells Grey that the only way he'll ever leave the institution is by presenting Frank with a logical story which shows he can be rehabilitated. Unable to talk about his own life, Grey instead investigates the case of a young man he believes was wrongly hanged in the hospital when it used to be a prison, and tries to prove his own innocence by analogy.

Although not as harrowing or bitterly intelligent as Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest this book has its own unique strengths, not least the final message of hope. It may be a little-too starry eyed, but it's a novel to get lost in.

The Act of Roger Murgatroyd: An Entertainment, by Gilbert Adair (Faber £7.99)

Pointing out that this novel is meant to be primarily an entertainment may be Adair's way of reminding readers that there's normally more to his work than a spanking, glittery narrative. He did, after all, write The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice. But if ever a book deserved to be called surface-deep it's this parody of an Agatha Christie-type crime novel.

After gossip columnist Raymond Gentry is found shot dead in a locked room at a Dartmoor country house on Boxing Day, a list is discovered in his bathrobe suggesting he intended to blackmail the other guests. Trubshawe, a retired police chief inspector plods through the evidence, but it's redoubtable crime writer Evadne Mount who seems to know exactly what's going on.

Featuring a host with a military bearing and a hidden past, a lying vicar, an actress with a cocaine habit, a drunken paediatrician, a sinister foreign con artist, and a naïve young flapper, this inconsequential romp manages to pull off a far neater trick than the murderer: by the end of the book, and against all odds, you actually want to know who dunnit and how. Three cheers for Gilbert Adair: Huzzah!

Are You With Me?, by Stephen Foster (Simon & Schuster £11.99)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Foster's novel is that it's been published at all. Coming of age stories are hardly in vogue. Memoirs seem to be the thing these days – it's easier that way to kid an audience you're writing about some kind of truth. In its simple, understated way, however, this book manages to capture something that feels awkwardly authentic.

Aged 15, Londoner Tom Radford moves to a small Norfolk village with his mother after his speedway rider father dies in a hit and run accident. He joins a crowd of misfits led by edgy and enlightened 18-year-old Luke, indulges the love of speed he's inherited from his father by going joy-riding and has a dirty teenage fumble with the one girl he really shouldn't.

Parts of this book are desperately annoying and some of the political posturing feels forced. The switches to Tom's mother's point of view aren't all that convincing, either. Ultimately, however, the observations of teenage life, Tom's slow-burning shock at his father's death and the trouble he has distancing himself from the motifs that signal his father's world, are painfully compelling.

Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India, by Rory Maclean (Penguin £8.99)

During the 1960s and '70s many young westerners set off for the east via Istanbul. Here Maclean takes the same journey, to see if there are any traces of that exodus remaining, and to try and chart its effects.

In Istanbul he meets a beautiful older English woman who tells him how she started off on the hippie trail and ended up, many years later, living in Nepal with her husband. When he died she had to return to a grim old folks' home in the UK, but couldn't stand it, walked out of the place leaving the door open, and bought a ticket for Istanbul: "I just got depressed living alone in a box in London, living for stuff. That was never the dream."

In Afghanistan he meets an American geologist searching for oil. "The dream of new political ideas changing the world has died," says the American. "The only viable, enduring philosophy now is wealth creation. Everyone wants to make money."

This is a remarkably profound book, underlining how far idealism can take you and how limiting pragmatism can be.

The Longest Pub Crawl, by Ian Marchant (Bloomsbury £7.99)

In 2004 the bon viveur, pub anorak and affable twit Ian Marchant embarked on a pub crawl from the Turk's Head in the Scilly Isles to the Baltasound Hotel on Unst, the most northerly of the Shetlands.

The journey is suitably free-flowing, teetering between a spot of Somerset cider tasting and trying to cure a hangover at St Anne's Well in the Malvern Hills, then on to Shropshire for "two piss-ups in two breweries". Marchant is irrepressible, leaking titbits about the foul history of temperance, whinging about vegetarians and cramming in as much local history as you'd expect from a pub quiz devotee.

Of course, in the same way that some individuals are born with a constitution that lets them down ten pints of ale and then run a dozen miles the next morning, there will be readers who'll be able to cope with all this pub fever without wishing Marchant had drowned in a barrel of gassy lager somewhere near High Holborn. For most, however, it's probably a book best-consumed in short measures.

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