Paperbacks: All For LoveCarnivorous NightsSellevisionMichelangelo and the reinvention of the human bodyThe Company of GhostsLetters to Lily: on how the world works

All For Love, by Dan Jacobson (PENGUIN £7.99)

The largely forgotten but true story of the scandalous love affair between Princess Louise, daughter of Leopold II of Belgium, and Geza Mattachich, a low-ranking soldier of Croatian birth, is the stuff of classic Mills & Boon. It began with a simple glance exchanged in a Viennese park, and a protracted wordless seduction facilitated by a go-between, before an emboldened Mattachich climbed his princess's balcony, tapped on her window and fell into bed with her. He then fought a duel with her husband - one of the last Hapsburg princes - and the couple set off on a spending spree around Europe, until they were banished from the Austro-Hungarian empire and then separately imprisoned (he for forgery, she for madness). Their love surmounted even this, and they escaped once more into each other's arms.

But Dan Jacobson doesn't write for Mills & Boon. His postmodern novelisation of the story contains all the thrilling assignations and action but he also applies a coating of mischievous irony over the romance, and punctures it, drawing attention to the psychological acuity of his characterisations and the realism of his historical drama. His princess is fat and 40, and unthinkingly wasteful of a fortune which, we're reminded, was viciously plundered from the Belgian Congo. The soldier is both calculating and absurd. Jacobson is as concerned with deconstructing historical fiction as he is with creating it. But luckily for his reader he's good enough to be able to have it both ways.

Carnivorous Nights, by Margaret Mittelbach & Michael Crewdson (CANONGATE £10.99)

Although its wolf-like body is decorated with "glorious Seussian" brown and gold stripes, the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, is actually a marsupial. It was Australia's top predator until the dingo arrived, at which point the mainland population was wiped out. Much later, British colonists settled in Tasmania and started to kill all the thylacines there too. The last confirmed thylacine died in Hobart Zoo in 1936 and it was declared officially extinct 50 years later. But unconfirmed sightings on the island are still regularly reported. A team of scientists at the Australian Museum working on a project to reconstruct its DNA and resurrect it, Jurassic Park-style, were fêted in the Australian press.

The authors of this colourful travelogue and informal zoology text - a pair of New York nature journalists - had been charmed by a stuffed thylacine in a Manhattan museum and decided to head to Tasmania with their eccentric artist friend Alexis Rockman (who provides the book's illustrations) in tow. Their mock-heroic account of this quixotic, somewhat shambolic expedition finds them tracking down Aboriginal rock art experts, conservationists, scientists and those convinced they've spotted a thylacine. They capture the essence of the beast and discover its importance to the island, even if they don't find an actual thylacine. Inevitably, their main findings are the all-too-obvious signs of environmental damage which is badly affecting Tasmania's unique, isolated and thus defenceless biodiversity.

Sellevision, by Augusten Burroughs (ATLANTIC £7.99)

Before Running With Scissors, the painfully funny, bestselling memoir of his dysfunctional upbringing, Augusten Burroughs had written this novel, which lays into vapid mainstream, consumerist America. It follows the working and personal lives of the hosts on America's top-rated retail broadcasting network, Sellevision, as they unravel over the course of several chaotic weeks. Bebe, who flogs the world's finest imitation diamond jewellery, shores up the cracks in her lonely life by compulsively shopping. Max gets fired after he inadvertently exposes his penis presenting the "Toys for Tots" segment, then struggles to adjust to a new life that feels meaningless because it's lived off-air. Peggy's perfectly ordered Christian life falls apart when a stalker makes her hyper-aware of her earlobe hair. She gets addicted to Vallium and fails to notice that her husband is playing away with the girl next door, and her son is playing with plastic explosives.

They're one-dimensional grotesques, but Burroughs does just enough to make us care about them, and after he's had his fun he's actually surprisingly kind to them. There's an autistic, Bret Easton Ellis-like level of attention paid to brand names, and satirical details create the appropriate level of plasticky hyperrealism - the station's latest on-air fiasco pushes the Barbra Streisand vice-presidential nomination scandal into third place on the news. Most of all, Burroughs's rendering of the host's inane on-air chatter is perfect and, when laid bare on the page, hilarious.

Michelangelo and the reinvention of the human body, by James Hall (PIMLICO £12.99)

James Hall makes the case for considering Michelangelo as the first modern artist. Unlike his contemporaries - true Renaissance men - Michelangelo single-mindedly pursued the same, limited range of personal subjects throughout his long career. The first "tunnel-visionary", Hall calls him. His primary obsession was, of course, the heroic male nude, and after that, the human form more generally. In this respect, Hall finds that he chimes perfectly with our own, somewhat narcissistic culture. But the greater part of Hall's project is to understand Michelangelo's art and concerns in the context of the artist's own times. He addresses the unflattering appearance of women in Michelangelo's art, in particular his unmaternal-seeming Madonnas, with reference to contemporary literary conventions and the ongoing evolution of the cult of the Virgin in the church. He views Michelangelo's love of colossal scale in light of the contemporary take on Classical mythology and the fashion for perspectival composition. And in every one of his male nudes, Hall sees Michelangelo's vision of the body of Christ, refracted through the lens of 15th-century religious teachings.

There's an ungenerous number of small, monochrome illustrations amid Hall's text, which obliges the reader to have a greater level of familiarity with Michelangelo's work than seems fair. In every other way, though, it's an accessible, illuminating study. Hall's writing is certainly erudite, but just occasionally can be fun too, and when he's looking closely at the artworks his prose becomes brilliantly vibrant, and he describes well the movement, energy and life that he sees in them.

The Company of Ghosts, by Lydie Salvayre (DALKEY ARCHIVE £7.99)

The first of the prize-winning French author Lydie Salvayre's novels to be made available in English, The Company of Ghosts is prefaced by its translator Christopher Woodall's account of the challenge he faced. On one level it's a straightforward story: the action unfolds in real time, between three characters in one room. But it's a stylistically quirky book which lurches between 1942 and the present, and between overlapping narrative voices and registers, with, Woodall says, "barely a comma by way of signposting". It's to his credit that the story remains playful and fluid, but still comprehensible and compelling.

The teenage narrator, Louisiane, opens the door of the flat she shares with her mother, Rose, to a "process server", come to make an inventory of their possessions. The process server sets about his grim task with a punctilious, implacable air, seemingly impervious to both the exaggerated and formal civility with which Louisiane addresses him, and Rose's contrasting stream of invective. Rose was unhinged by the trauma and grief she experienced during the war. She's stuck in 1942, the world she lives in is eternally repressive, and she sees the faces of her former tormentors, Marshal Pétain and General Darnand, in everyone she meets. She takes the process server to be one of Darnand's militia thugs. As past and present bleed into one, Salvayre seems to want us to see this continuity for ourselves, and compare the present bureaucratic state with the repressive collaborationist government of Vichy. A depressing, claustrophobic story, then, but it's enlivened by some mordant humour and the narrator's soaring display of verbal acrobatics.

Letters to Lily: on how the world works, by Alan Macfarlane (PROFILE £7.99)

In the 30 letters which historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane has written for his young granddaughter to grow into, so that together they might "explore the world in a continuing conversation long after I am old or dead", he describes his view of the human condition and the evolving drama of human affairs, and tries to answer some of the big questions he thinks she might have about love, violence, religion, democracy, sex, life and death. Although a little twee at times, it makes for a nice work of informal philosophy and non-academic generalism. Because they're ostensibly addressed to the granddaughter of a very English don, several letters focus on the rather unique and peculiar social, political and economic development of this island, from feudal times onwards. But this Anglocentricity doesn't really lessen the universalism that is the book's strength.

Macfarlane urges Lily to question her most basic assumptions and to understand our present state better, precisely by bearing in mind the extraordinarily diverse number of ways of living there are or have been in the world. He reminds her that, for example, nations and nationalism are constructs invented only very recently, or that democracy and capitalism aren't the only workable governing systems. The benefit of taking such a general overview is that it puts one in a good position to sort the immutables of the human condition from the aspects of ourselves which we should strive to improve on. The success of Macfarlane's book is that his expansive general overview is made to feel manageable because of its intimate, wise, grandfatherly tone.

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