Paperbacks: Asboville Lost Voices: Memories of a vanished way of life Mortality How Are Things? Ed Reardon's Week Oh, The Glory Of It All

Asboville by Danny Rhodes (MAIA £8.99)

The jacket shows the author's name and the title tagged with spraypaint on the side of a wall. On page one, a group of teenagers with their hoodies up, their hands in their pockets or fiddling with their mobiles, are kicking an empty lager can around their London housing estate, talking about which girls are up for it, and who was sick in a wheelie bin last night after smoking too much puff. You think you know their type, and you think that you've got the measure of Danny Rhodes's first novel from the off. But then 16-year-old JB is Asboed and sent to a small seaside town to live with his uncle, where he's to paint beach-huts every day for a summer, and it turns out that Asboville is a fairly sedate coming-of-age story with an actually rather shy, sensitive and likeable kid as its hero.

At first he's resentful and lonely in his new life, missing his friends and wary of his caseworker. But the repetitive work forces a kind of Zen calm upon him, he begins to take pride in his work, and then he meets a girl he likes. It isn't long before trouble catches up with him - the local teen tearaways are impressed to have an Asbo kid from London in their midst, while the grown-ups are up in arms - but just maybe this time he'll be man enough to deal with trouble in the right way.

Asboville is even-handed in its presentation of the Asbo debate, but while its teen protagonists are believable, the adults never really come into focus and its ideal audience is probably around JB's age. The more challenging read would have had JB as a genuine anti-hero.

Lost Voices: Memories of a vanished way of life by Gilda O'Neill (ARROW £7.99)

The novelist, memoirist and social historian Gilda O'Neill has a few childhood memories (the smell of earth and the tang of hops, chasing her cousin around galvanised tin shacks, biting into a live worm) which place her as a member of one of those generations of women from the East End who, throughout the first half of the 20th century, enjoyed annual autumnal working holidays picking hops in Kent. Wanting to preserve this small fragment of her identity, she interviewed 10 other women and collated their memories of hopping.

Though the work was hard, the weather often grim, the accommodation in the tin hoppers' huts primitive, and the pay low, for most of them it offered a very welcome respite from the drudgery of their home lives. It was the only way they were likely to get a break in the countryside, it offered them a chance to save a few bob to see them through Christmas and, above all, the opportunity to get away from their sometimes violent menfolk.

Their voices are loud and ebullient on the page and, needless to say, their memories are vivid and evocative, particularly for anyone from that era or area. But O'Neill takes her job as a social historian seriously and takes the opportunity to lecture on the uses and abuses of oral history, and the interplay between social history, personal identities and memory. It's a shame that this obliges her to keep her sources anonymous, and her own text can be rather dry. But at least, whoever they are, these women's stories live on.

Mortality by Nicholas Royle (SERPENT'S TAIL £8.99)

A collection of his short stories dating back as far as 1990, Mortality finds Nicholas Royle returning to familiar psychic territory, much as his obsessive, weird or lonely characters are often compelled to do. We see that he's been writing about films, art, photography and memories, remembered affairs and missed opportunities, sex, desire and obsession, killings, suicides and open verdicts, psychogeography, abandoned buildings, hidden lives, ghosts and doppelgängers for a long time now.

One of these stories was either an outtake or a rehearsal for his snuff-movie thrillers The Director's Cut and Antwerp. Other lines or images are so typical you wouldn't be surprised to find he's since reused them. In "Nine Years", for example, a man has looked up a woman he once nearly had sex with nine years ago. Standing at her window at night, looking at the railway lines below, the yellow windows of a passing train "judder unsteadily like frames of film in the gate of an old projector". With that one line, other people's lives are made as alluring and unobtainable as images on celluloid, and the man watching them pass by becomes a lonely voyeur.

The short story form, just made for the cunning twist in the tale, but which also encourages writers to create enigmas, to be subtle and allusive, and leave things unsaid or hanging in the air, is well suited to Royle, and he to it. He makes the ordinary seem spooky and the uncanny seem believable. For a collection of recycled material, it's pretty impressive.

How Are Things? by Roger-Pol Droit trs Theo Cuffe (FABER £7.99)

One evening at a party, quite casually and innocently, a man asked Roger-Pol Droit, "How are things?" But because he's a deep-thinking kind of fellow for whom simple words can hold much meaning, and the kind who tends to answer questions with other questions - in short, because he's a French philosopher - the question nagged at him for the rest of the evening: "How are what things? All things? Things in general?" And kept on nagging at him: "Do we ever try to find out how things are doing?" And kept on nagging, until: "Whatever we mean by the term 'thing' has suddenly become opaque..."

OK, perhaps he's not someone you'd want to invite to your next party. But once he starts getting his head round things - by studying them intently for a year, examining them and his relationships with them afresh, then describing them rather as would a Martian sending a postcard home - it turns out that he is very fine, witty and interesting company, and his childlike wonder at the world of everyday objects is infectious. In Cuffe's translation, his writing is wryly conversational, but still sharp and precise. Laying down his first principles of comparative forkology, for instance: "What is a fork if not an anti-bowl?" Or on TV, a seductive soporific: "You think the whole world has paid a visit to your living room. And so it has. But you were out." By the experiment's end he's still liable to say such things as "I am finding this teapot a bit perplexing", but he's nevertheless aware he's found a new, enjoyable and illuminating way of leading the examined life.

Ed Reardon's Week by Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds (POCKET BOOKS £6.99)

In his own mind, fiftysomething writer Ed Reardon is a literary genius whose present financial difficulties only make the comparisons to Dostoevsky more valid. In the real world, where he's a sitcom character as curmudgeonly as Victor Meldrew and as deluded as David Brent, he's actually quite well known to listeners of Radio 4, where Ed Reardon's Week is currently being repeated. But in the cruel world that Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds have created for him, his more successful friends get to appear with "Sue Lobotomy" on Desert Island Discs and receive podgy-thumbs-up reviews from Mark "Fatty" Lawson on Front Row, while he's reduced to appearing on Saga digital radio to promote his latest book Pet Peeves (about the things the pets of celebrities would say if they could talk) and the only reviewer to have mentioned Pet Peeves in print ("a nice little read") writes for Caravan and Camper.

Ed wants to photocopy the review, but typical of the kind of irritant he daily encounters, the youth behind the library counter won't give him any change, so he has to steal the magazine. Unable to pay the resulting fine he's banged up in prison, which is irritating, but at least makes him feel like Dostoevsky again.

Ed drinks and curses his way through humiliation after humiliation, pausing only to rant about the ever-increasing asininity of everyday life, and Radio 4 in particular. If the thought of Jack Woolley having sex with a sheep tickles you, or those Grumpy Old Men just aren't grumpy enough for you, then this will certainly be a nice little read.

Oh, The Glory Of It All by Sean Wilsey (PENGUIN £8.99)

Sean Wilsey is an editor at McSweeney's, the magazine founded by Dave Eggers, and his memoir is of a similar style, ambition and heft to Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It plays similar self-aware games with the genre, and makes you wonder if it might not even be a novel dressed up as autobiography. It's got stylistic flourishes and a multiplicity of forms - prose, scripts, cartoons, poems, court transcripts and newspaper extracts - and is as crammed full of pop culture references as any memoir by someone who grew up in the media age needs to be. It's also a biting exposé and bitter swipe at the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Wilsey's father founded a multi-million-dollar business empire upon individually wrapped butter portions. His mother modelled, dated Frank Sinatra, then settled in San Francisco to write a society column and host the city's most glamorous parties. Wilsey spent his early childhood amusing himself while film stars, musicians, radicals and astronauts argued at the dinner table downstairs.

Then his parents very publicly divorced, and you suspect he still isn't over the trauma. His mother turned into Norma Desmond; his stepmother was Joan Crawford at her most evil. He spent his adolescence drifting between schools, meeting the famous, having sex, taking drugs and thieving. An overlong but rarely dull mix of Running With Scissors, Less Than Zero and The OC, Wilsey's book is the most all-out entertaining bit of navel-gazing I've read in some time.

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