PAPERBACKS

MELMOTH THE WANDERER

Charles Robert Maturin (Serpent’s Tail, £8.99)

From Frankenstein to Wuthering Heights, Gothic Romance has enjoyed a long shelf-life, but Melmoth the Wanderer, published in 1820, never caught on in the same way. It begins with student John Melmoth visiting his dying uncle and becoming intrigued by a portrait depicting a distant relative who, so it’s said, sold his soul for immortality and has been walking the Earth for 150 years. From there, we are plunged into a complex montage of stories within stories as Maturin experiments with the novel form to explore his evil, seductive but tortured creation. It was denounced upon publication for alleged blasphemy, brutality and obscenity – not entirely unfairly, as Maturin, although a Galway vicar, was deliberately trying to push the envelope of what was acceptable. This edition coincides with the publication of a postmodern take on the original by Sarah Perry, who contributes a new introduction, making it a good time to catch up with one of the “crowning achievements” of the era.

CHRISTMAS DAYS

Jeanette Winterson (Vintage, £10.99)

Winterson has established a tradition of writing a new story each Christmas. This book contains twelve of them, each accompanied by a seasonal recipe. She may have had a famously awful childhood, but Christmas was always a highlight for her, and her enduring love of it is in no way ironic, cynical or forced. Her belief in its magic is reflected in the stories, where we find ghosts, angels, orphans, snowmen with souls and the Nativity told from the point of view of a donkey. Santa relieves people of their possessions rather than adding to them, while the spirit of Christmas, in the form of a child, is trapped in a Nativity window display. In her introduction, she lets her readers know that her idea of Christmas is the pagan-based festival that’s messily evolved over the centuries, in which joyfulness and goodwill triumph over both Christianity and commerce, and her inclusion of personal anecdotes and friends’ recipes enhances the warm glow.

ANOTHER FINE MESS

Tim Moore (Yellow Jersey, £14.99)

Rocked by the election of Donald Trump, British journalist Tim Moore needed to take a closer look at the country that voted him in. Like many before him, he decided to take a road trip in pursuit of the American Dream. But no one before had done it in a 1924 Model T Ford, still less going through the “fiendish, vexatious and often terrifying process” of learning to drive it at the same time. Along the way, he looks at the Mid-West and Bible Belt through the lens of Henry Ford’s incredible success story, charting how the industrial landscape of America was transformed by him, before subsequently falling into a steep decline. Moore actually talks to people about politics less than you’d expect. But he’s very good at soaking up the strangeness of America and relating it back to his readers with an easy-going observational humour that only threatens to desert him when he contemplates the excesses of the current administration.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT