Paperback reviews

Originally published in 1987, this seminal Scots novel, reissued with a foreword by Irvine Welsh, is about Morris Magellan, a husband and father of two who works as an executive in a biscuit factory. Alcohol is destroying his life and he knows it, but drink to Morris has always been the solution, not the problem. A powerful portrayal of alcoholism, this is less about his drinking than about the man behind the drinking, a man who, after a childhood dominated by his cold and psychologically abusive father, doesn’t know who he is or how to be himself. Told in the second person, the narrative creates a distance between the narrator and the central character, forcing the reader to identify with Morris, however terribly he behaves to those around him. Overshadowed by the likes of Kelman and Welsh for years, this is a brilliantly conceived and executed novel which deserves as much attention as the best works of Butlin’s better-known contemporaries.

THE LITTLE VIRTUES

Natalia Ginzburg (Daunt Books, £9.99)

Born in Palermo in 1916, the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, Natalia Ginzburg eventually became an important figure in the Italian literary scene. But her Jewish heritage, radical upbringing and anti-fascist activism made it a bumpy ride. The 11 essays here, written between 1944 and 1960, constitute what Rachel Cusk, in her introduction, calls “an autobiography of sorts”. They capture Ginzburg as a young mother in rural Italy, her husband’s torture and death in prison, the discovery of her vocation as a writer, homesickness in London and the emotional disconnection of a later relationship. The title essay is a plea to parents not to instil “little virtues” like caution and thrift in their children but to encourage them to explore their humanity to the full. It’s a variable collection: her tone of detachment and objectivity can make an essay feel like a joyless plod, only for it to be enlivened by a sudden flash of insight or self-awareness.

JANE AUSTEN AT HOME

Lucy Worsley (Hodder, £9.99)

There’s no shortage of Jane Austen biographies, but ubiquitous TV historian Lucy Worsley stakes out her own territory by focusing on the author’s surroundings, seeking insight from the homes Austen occupied, from her early days at Steventon Rectory to her final lodgings in Winchester. For an author who focused so much on the domestic sphere, Jane Austen led a peripatetic life, and her anxiety over having a stable home leaked into her fiction. But that very experience of both humble circumstances and high society informed her writing, according to Worsley, her large extended family and social circle providing models for the broad cast of characters she wrote about. Although she conjures up the world of Jane Austen in remarkable detail, Worsley has a tendency to speculate wildly about Jane herself, making assertions she can’t back up and which might have been better omitted. But she so successfully recreates her surroundings that we can almost picture ourselves walking through them with her.