Paperbacks: Dancing in the DarkThe Sound of No Hands ClappingLooking for Jake and other storiesDebts of DishonourFencing Paradise: the uses and abuses of plantsSaving the Daylight: Why we put the clocks forward

Dancing in the Dark by Caryl Phillips (VINTAGE £7.99)

Caryl Phillips's bitterly elegiac eleventh novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the life of one of America's most successful vaudevillians, Bert Williams. Williams arrives in California from the Caribbean aged 11, and quickly learns how to play the dumb nigger. In 1895, with his friend and straight man George Walker, he corks his light-skinned face and begins playing that same role in a black and black minstrel show called the Two Real Coons, which the pair tour around America until, by the turn of the century, they are the toast of Broadway.

But success only worsens his fragile sense of self. He lies awake at night contemplating how to hone his act, so that he might impress the audience ever more with his artistry. The disapproval of his father, who saw the show once and stopped speaking to him, weighs heavily against his need to please the audience.

Phillips uses a number of voices and registers to create a fascinating, multi-faceted portrait of a man who isn't entirely knowable, least of all to himself. It's a rich and evocative novel on its own terms. But, while Phillips isn't so crass as to allow his own authorial voice to intrude, it's still clear that he expects us to find that Williams' story resonates with the contemporary American entertainment industry, in which black performers are still restricted in the number of roles they can play and certain rappers, for example, have made themselves comparably wealthy peddling negative caricatures of blackness to white audiences.

The Sound of No Hands Clapping by Toby Young (ABACUS £11.99)

Picking up where How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, Toby Young's memoir of his abortive career as a New York magazine journalist left off, this second memoir is structured around his subsequent dealings with Hollywood, and padded out with material about his upcoming nuptials. The shtick is the same: Young is a crass, ambitious and shameless social climber - but so upfront about it that hopefully we'll overlook all that and think him winningly self-deprecating. The unavoidable problem is that Lose Friends made him into a bestselling author and in-demand media commentator, with several regular columns to his name and two film projects on the go. On top of which, he's about to be married. He's reduced to reproducing his bad reviews, and recalling the time he gave an inappropriate best man's speech, or the time he went to a penis enlargement clinic and the surgeon didn't spot him as an undercover journalist, in order to convince us that he's still deserving of our sympathy.

Where Lose Friends also worked as an acute exposé of vapid New York fashionistas, No Hands Clapping has nothing to add to the already vast literature on Hollywood mores. And, back in London for his second memoir, there's no getting away from the fact that he's an extremely well-connected member of the media set. The anecdotes about his famous contemporaries and Young's undeniably amusing prose make it an easy, gossipy read, and at least, I suppose, it's in keeping with his perennial loser persona that he failed to quit while ahead.

Looking for Jake and other stories by China Miéville (PAN £6.99)

China Miéville is known and admired for four fantasy novels - or "New Weird" writing, as he'd prefer it - set in an alternative universe called Bas-Lag. With one exception, the stories in Looking For Jake, a collection of his short-form speculative fiction that dates back to 1998, aren't set there but in only slightly skewed versions of our own world, which makes them all the more unsettling.

"Reports of Certain Events in London" is a fragmentary and obscurant metafiction in the style of Iain Sinclair, which reconfigures London topography. People and places that should be there suddenly aren't. The title story, very much in the vein of J G Ballard's early disaster fiction, has the narrator looking for his friend in London streets that have befallen some "inexact apocalypse". "On the Way to the Front" is a comic strip (illustrated in pen and ink by Liam Sharp) depicting noirish, rainy, recognisably London streets. But at the edges of its frames are glimpsed soldiers, gathering sinisterly for unspecified reasons.

"The Familiar" is a visceral monster story about an otherworldly creature hatched in an allotment potting shed. By contrast, the dispassionate tone of "Entry Taken From a Medical Encyclopaedia" makes the peculiar Cronenbergian parasitic brain disease he imagines all the more squirm-inducingly vivid.

Miéville's committed fans might miss the epic sweep, narrative complexity and political satire of his novels, but it's nevertheless an impressive collection, with an array of forms but a consistently unnerving tone.

Debts of Dishonour by Jill Paton Walsh (HODDER £6.99)

Having completed two of Dorothy L Sayer's unfinished manuscripts, Jill Paton Walsh is fully conversant with the conventions of Golden Age detective fiction, and her novels, featuring the nurse and amateur sleuth Imogen Quy, of which this is the third, resurrect the genre faithfully and almost wholly unreconstructed. They are set in the rarefied milieu of a Cambridge college, where I suppose it's just about plausible that people still talk like Lord Peter Wimsey. Imogen's nursing duties there apparently amount to no more than tending to the sprains sustained by the college's rugby, rowing and hockey teams, thus leaving her with plenty of time to investigate when the rich industrialist and college alumnus Sir Julius Farran dies - apparently by misadventure. Imogen had met Sir Julius weeks previously, dining at High Table, and he'd told her that he feared for his safety.

" 'Well, I don't know!' said Imogen, wide-eyed. 'I never knew business was such a jungle.' " But such innocence is ill-afforded when it's revealed that her college's bursar had invested in Sir Julius's company and now faces financial ruin. To keep everyone at St Agatha's in the style to which they're accustomed, she will have to use her worldly charms to untangle Sir Julius's complicated web of boardroom and bedroom dealings.

If you can make yourself care enough about these privileged stock characters, Paton Walsh has constructed a cunning enough whodunnit, and adheres to the rules of the genre with the strictest sense of fair play.

Fencing Paradise: the uses and abuses of plants by Richard Mabey (EDEN PROJECT £8.99)

Mabey's lucid and very erudite "pot-pourri of responses, recollections and free associations" was sparked off by three seasons' worth of visits to the Eden Project. The ambitious scale of that massive hothouse umbrella is reflected in the breadth of his contemplation. He invariably lauds the Project as a centre for education and conservation, but he's more interested in it as a mixed metaphor for our ambivalent relationship with plants: "The natural world is now increasingly contained, both physically and in our minds, in enclosed reserves and managed gardens, in simulations and virtual experiences. Paradise has become a fenced enclosure."

Tracing the plant's role in human affairs from the earliest recorded genesis stories, through the agrarian revolution and right up to the myths propounded by today's cosmetics and food-supplement industries, he argues that there has been a shift in perception such that we've separated ourselves physically and psychologically from nature's realm, in order to claim dominion over it.

As he revels in pre-agrarian mythology and urges us to "reconnect with nature", it may at first seem that Mabey is indulging in hippyish twaddle. But, actually, he's got the Structuralists' reading of myth as a useful tool with which to negotiate the gap between science and human culture; the recent scientific rehabilitation of James Lovelock's 1960s Gaia theory; and the practical science of biomimetics (the adaptation of natural systems and methods for modern technology), to back him up.

Saving the Daylight: Why we put the clocks forward by David Prerau (GRANTA £8.99)

Staying in Paris one night in 1724, Benjamin Franklin - a habitual late-riser - was shocked to awaken at 6am and find sunlight streaming through his window. Discovering that he'd been wasting six hours of sunlight each summer morning, and concomitantly, wasting money on six hours' worth of candlelight each evening, he only half-facetiously proposed in a letter to the Journal de Paris, taxing all shuttered windows and firing canons at sunrise. Assuming all Parisians had liked to rise at noon, as he did, he calculated the city would make an annual saving equivalent to around £100m today.

Coincidentally, the eminent Victorian architect William Willett arrived at the same amount when he more conservatively estimated the annual saving Great Britain would make, if it switched to the daylight saving hours he proposed in his self-published 1907 pamphlet, The Waste of Daylight. Willett's vigorous campaigning, eloquently endorsed by such public figures as Conan Doyle and the then Home Secretary Winston Churchill, eventually resulted in the Daylight Saving Act of 1918. The detail of the public and parliamentary debate that lasted for the decade in between, forms the substance of David Prerau's book. Some of it is very droll - under the new proposals, a man "would appear on the streets of London in evening dress at 5.40, which would shake the British Empire to its foundations" raged The Outlook - much of it is rather more tedious. Prerau's obscure subject matter in the end makes for an only mildly diverting way to waste a few hours.

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