Paperbacks: CowardRemainderDoes Anything Eat Wasps?PaperMy Life and Work With Alfred VogelGrace and Truth

Coward, by Sheridan Morley (HAUS £10.99)

Morley begins this biography of the iconic actor, playwright, composer and performer of popular music with a question: who needs another book about Noel Coward? Coward wrote three autobiographies and Morley has already turned in several volumes about him. There is, the author maintains, still something say, based on his own experiences of directing Coward's plays.

Coward met his muse, Gertrude Lawrence, in 1913, when they were both young teenagers. After telling him to call her Gertie, he wrote, she "gave me an orange and told me a few mildly dirty stories. I loved her from then onwards" - in fact for 30 years. It was, of course, never love in the conventional sense; as Morely reminds us, "Noel was a lifelong gay and Gertie lifelong impossible."

One of the best things about this book is the author's style. Take Coward's brief spell in the army. Morley writes: "You could indeed argue that a summons to the Camberwell swimming baths was not the most auspicious beginning to a career in the armed forces." Fortunately, King and Country took a "dim view of the usefulness of Noel to the war effort" and he was sent to "the Artists' Rifles, a well-known refuge for those of an unwarlike disposition". Morley aside, however, Coward remains a compelling figure. A modern audience is more likely to remember him for his role alongside Michael Caine in The Italian Job than for songs like "Mad Dogs and Englishmen", but this book makes a good case for revisiting the whole of his back-catalogue.

Remainder, by Tom McCarthy (METRONOME £6)

The unnamed narrator of this novel receives £8m compensation following an unspecified accident. Something fell out of the sky, it seems, but he can't say any more owing to the terms of the agreement reached with the shadowy forces responsible. He invests much of the money; the rest he spends trying to resolve a feeling that's developed since his rehabilitation, that he is merely acting out a part. At a party, some vague scenes enter his head: a crack in the wall which spreads out into memories of a whole building and the red roofs of buildings opposite, dotted with black cats. He sketches the memory, buys an apartment block in Brixton, has it re-decorated down to every last detail he can remember, populates it with actors, and then begins a series of precise re-enactments.

There are problems, of course. The cats on the roofs of the buildings opposite (which he has also bought) keep falling to their deaths, needing to be replaced regularly by members of his ever-expanding team. A musician gets caught cheating by playing a tape loop of his piano practice. Other re-enactments follow: a bizarre incident outside a tyre workshop results in a team of children endlessly repeating the scene in a London warehouse; a man is shot by contract killers and the narrator takes over the crime scene so he can repeatedly re-enact the victim's last moments.

How authentic might a re-enactment become? How real can a copy be? Dark and witty, Remainder poses some very interesting questions.

Does Anything Eat Wasps? Ed Mick O'Hare (PROFILE £7.99)

This book collects some of the best questions in New Scientist's Last Word column, posed largely, it would seem, by non-specialist readers in the hope that some (occasionally mad) scientist will come to their aid with a cast-iron answer. Can eating green potatoes kill you? How fat do you have to be to become bulletproof? What is the maximum length of a vertical straw with which you can drink cola? The answers are always comprehensive. A 60cm-thick layer of body fat may be bulletproof but that degree of fat "comes with its own health hazards". And yes, green potatoes can be lethal.

Among the most intriguing questions must surely be the one asking whether a cat can be dropped from any height without suffering injury. The reply refers to a study called "High-rise syndrome in cats" carried out by two New York vets - 90 per cent of cats brought to hospital after falls from between two and 32 storeys survived, with the greatest incidence of death and maiming occurring at around seven storeys - higher than that and it actually decreased.

Despite the fact that the answers often spin off into worryingly scientific terms like "terminal velocity", there is a lot to be learnt here and much food for further thought. On the subject of falling cats a reader wrote in suggesting that, because cats always land on their feet and toast always lands buttered side down, perpetual motion might be achieved by strapping a slice of buttered toast to a cat's back.

Paper, by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani (BLOOMSBURY £7.99)

The Scribe, a pen-pusher in 19th-century Persia, makes his living writing wills and contracts on straw paper made of "insults and macerated hemp". Straw paper is no good for writing poetry because it leads to unsightly blots. But then what paper is worthy of poetry? This novel charts the Scribe's quest to find out.

We first meet him as he wakes from a fevered dream in which he tries to gather paper for his poetry. On waking he remembers that his "legendary thumbnail", filed to a quill-like point, has become infected, and he has no idea whether or not he has lost his hand - and therefore his craft - while he slept. He finds his hand still intact: "saved so that he might be a poet". It has been bandaged with paper.

In this novel you are never more than a sentence away from another reference to paper. Every page holds yet more about paper's history, production and meaning. In places this is very interesting - I learnt, for example, of the rag paper made from corpse's blankets in the plague: "The deadly disease had thus been spread from page to page, from high court to harem." But at times it's overdone. This may be because of Nakhjavani's overwrought prose, in which everything heavy seems to be "like lead" and no one can do anything without bringing along some adverbs. In places it's simply impenetrable: "The loud voice grated like chalk against the slate of the Scribe's weak consciousness. His mind surfaced slowly, saturated with sleep, limp on the mesh of dreams as another presence barrelled into his room. Immortality was congested." Indeed.

My Life and Work With Alfred Vogel, by Jan de Vries (MAINSTREAM £9.99)

An association with Alfred Vogel, pioneer of herbal medicine and founder of Bioforce, one of the world's leading manufacturers of natural remedies, offers an unassailable credibility in the world of alternative health. It's not surprising then, how often de Vries tells us about his special friendship with the Swiss master, or how he was the only person Vogel entrusted with all his healing methods and ideas. So it's curious how banal much of de Vries' advice sounds: "My mother used to say, if you look around, you will always find somebody who is worse off than you." And there's very little rigorous investigation to support his assertions. Studying a prisoner, he postulates: "One of my subjects had committed a number of murders. After spending some time with him and learning about his dietary habits, I became convinced that his appalling diet had affected his mind so much that it had caused him to lose control and exhibit extremely violent behaviour." Before killing his last victim the man apparently drank six cups of milky coffee (he was allergic to milk), each containing six spoons of sugar, ate half a loaf of bread (he was allergic to wheat) and then gorged himself on chocolate. Presumably de Vries has never heard of Beavis and Butthead and the Great Cornholio.

Many of the authors' suggestions will help you lead a happier, healthier life. Unfortunately some sound dietary advice ("Care should also be taken with the three 'Ss' - salt, sugar and saturated fats") is diluted by a wealth of platitudes (go to bed earlier, enjoy your work, it is possible to worry yourself to death).

Grace and Truth, by Jennifer Johnston (REVIEW £7.99)

It's generally hard to tell where you're heading in Jennifer Johnston's novels; just when it feels like you're wandering through the hinterland of some crusty conservative plot, unorthodox things start to happen. This novel is no exception, the secret at its heart being not only shocking but refreshingly unexpected.

Sally is an actress looking forward to seeing her husband and taking a break from the stage after a successful European tour performing the part of Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World. Returning to her home near Dublin, however, she learns that her husband wants to leave her. After helping him on his way with a couple of well-aimed coffee mugs and insisting he's gone, together with all of his belongings, before the night is out, she realises precisely how alone in the world she really is. An only child, she has no children of her own. Her mother, who suffered awful bouts of depression before eventually taking her own life ("I do not want either God or my father at my funeral," read the suicide note), refused to reveal the name of Sally's father. Her only living relative is her grandfather, a severe Church of Ireland Bishop. She contacts him, but he makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with her - and he certainly isn't prepared to shed any light on who her father might be.

As the story unfolds Sally compulsively follows the TV coverage of the war in Iraq, questioning the truth of what she sees. At the same time she becomes aware that even the little she thinks she knows for sure about her past may not be beyond question.

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