Paperbacks: The Price of Water in Finistère Collapse The Last Shot In Search of H V Morton The Republic of Trees Letters to a Spiritual Seeker

The Price of Water in Finistère by Bodil Malmsten (VINTAGE £6.99)

Finistère is located on the west coast of Brittany, one of the most dangerous stretches of coastline in the world. When, aged 55, the Swedish writer Bodil Malmsten decided that the area, with its storms, cliffs, sandbanks and tidal currents, was the one place in the world she wanted to live, all of her friends thought her mad. It wasn't as if her arrival was part of some grand plan; she simply "set off on a Sunday, April 16, 2000" with a good idea of what she was leaving, but none whatsoever of where she was heading.

In other hands this book might have been a dreadful mistake, but Malmsten is the kind of eccentric you can warm to. She's crazy in a very unselfish way - for someone writing about self-exile and a solitary life there's remarkably little in it about her. This is a book full of outrage and exasperation at the world's dysfunctionality and the inability of those who govern it to do even a remotely good job. Some of the humour is light; there's a large amount of advice about gardening. ("In the Swedish gardening book moles are found together with hedgehogs and bats under the heading 'Other friendly small animals... They do no great harm'.") But it's her comments on the withering force of business ("People are lethally stressed by being forced to choose between too many alternatives too rapidly and simultaneously ... All those franchise owners, all those entrepreneurs picked by the powerful, those axe-murderers hired to butcher the body of society") that make this such a special work.

Collapse by Jared Diamond (PENGUIN £9.99)

Why have the world's most powerful societies fallen? Could our own civilisation one day rank among the ruins of the Mayan cities or the haunting stone monuments of Easter Island? Diamond's detailed account of why past cultures have failed and the lessons we should learn in order to stop ours going the same way is never less than thoroughly engrossing.

Reminding us how 12-ton Easter Island stone heads had to be moved several miles from the quarries where they were carved to plinths where they were erected without scaffolding or cranes, surely only makes them more astonishing. The scale and ingenuity of such endeavour also offer some hope when it comes to sorting out impending catastrophes like global warming - just so long as people acknowledge what's going wrong and act on it. The inhabitants of Easter Island remained blind to the potential consequences of deforestation (they used trees to transport their statues) until it was too late; every tree species on the island became extinct and so did the indigenous culture.

Diamond argues that "the interests of big businesses, environmentalists, and society as a whole coincide more often than you might guess from all the mutual blaming." It's a fair point, and one indicative of his optimism. With over three-quarters of the world's farmland damaged, over half of its forests chopped down and global temperatures steadily rising, optimists may soon be in short supply.

The Last Shot by Hugo Hamilton (HARPER PERENNIAL £7.99)

Two doomed love stories set 40 years apart form the basis of Hamilton's second novel, originally published in 1991 before he moved on to a darker, far less consciously literary kind of fiction with books like Sad Bastard and Headbanger. The first story is set at the end of the second world war in Czechoslovakia, and involves the escape of clerical worker Bertha Sommer and Wehrmacht officer Franz Kern from the German garrison at Laun. Franz convinces her that anything will be better than throwing herself on the mercy of the advancing Russian army. In the second story, set in the 1980s, a young American visits Laun, renamed Louny, in an attempt to discover who fired the last shot of the war. While he investigates the complex heritage of wartime resistance in the area against the Germans, he struggles with the complexities of an affair he's having. His lover and her husband have a disabled son and a relationship that seems to accommodate infidelity. The stories draw together neatly, if depressingly.

There's nothing particularly memorable about either tale, but references to events like the 1945 carnage in Prague when SS troops refused to acknowledge defeat and continued to slaughter civilians, or the invasion of Czechoslovakia by 200,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers in 1968 as a response to the country's shift towards democracy, raise some probing questions about liberty and responsibility. A powerful, but strangely introverted novel.

In Search of H V Morton by Michael Bartholomew (METHUEN £8.99)

Morton was the author of In Search of England, an account of his journeys around the country's towns and hamlets in the 1920s - it enjoyed such success that he went on to write about the rest of Britain. This biography begins respectfully and ends in an air of faint disgust; it's a fascinating piece of iconoclasm.

At first it's just the odd waspish detail that gives the game away. We hear how, having forsaken a career as a cavalry officer for one as a journalist, Morton was slow to accept the dreary nature of his early assignments. In 1919 he finally had an epiphany over a sale of army surplus equipment in White City, writing in his memoir: "It set the pattern for the slightly off-beat story which was to tide me over until I could do more developed work." Bartholomew describes the resulting article as "whimsical and overwritten... unmemorable". He comments about another technique Morton developed: "He wrote up his reports of some events that he was covering before they had taken place."

Factually, the book is very thorough. After the Second World War, though, the author's patience with his subject seems to snap: "In his diaries he regularly expressed hatred of democracy... There is also, running right through his writing, an uncritical deployment of the stereotype of the Jew as a grasping, scheming alien." The major fault in this biography, however, is Bartholomew's obsession with Morton's persistent womanising. So what? A racist writing travel books and forming an image of England is one thing; a philanderer doing the same job is perfectly normal.

The Republic of Trees by Sam Taylor (FABER £7.99)

Following his English father's death, young Michael, his French mother and his older brother Louis decamp from a suburban housing estate in the Midlands to the French town of St Argen and the company of their wicked aunt Céline. Soon after arriving, Michael's mother kills herself. He then develops a new personality and starts to daydream more than those around him think is normal. It's only when an English family with two children, Isobel and Alex, move into a large house nearby that his rather depressing life gets a lift. Before long, the four pubescent friends escape on their bikes and set up camp in the depths of the French countryside. Michael develops a crush on Isobel; Isobel (when she isn't jerking Michael off in the idyllic stream flowing past their camp) lies around sunbathing; Alex wanders off into the woods shooting things and Louis dreams of forming a new society, The Republic of Trees. For a time the kids enjoy themselves, re-enacting moments from the French revolution and getting to grips with Rousseau's Social Contract.

All of this is fairly entertaining and occasionally unnerving. Sadly, however, Taylor's brave attempt to fuse the works of Enid Blyton with The Lord of the Flies comes unstuck with the arrival of a girl called Joy. Joy is the kind of character that any self-respecting teenager would either ostracise on sight or, scenting lunacy, simply hide from. Not so our four little revolutionaries, who ultimately pay a bloody and thoroughly expected price for allowing her into their midst. Of course Michael's memory lapses might mean it's all just a...

Letters to a Spiritual Seeker by Henry David Thoreau (NORTON £8.99)

This collection of letters comprises a dialogue between Thoreau, the author of Walden (a first-person account of a year spent living simply and trying to overcome the obstacles society places in the way of spiritual attainment) and an earnest admirer. The correspondence starts in 1848 with a letter from Harrison Blake in which he states the significance he sees in Thoreau's life ("You would sunder yourself from society, from the spell of institutions, customs, conventionalities, that you might lead a fresh, simple life with God") and asks for help in following a spiritual path of his own. The letter shows a remarkable degree of foresight; at the time Thoreau would have been almost completely unknown. His reply consists of thoughts written, as he says, "at random", but the letters, stretching over a 13-year period, see Thoreau's views becoming gradually more coherent. No doubt Thoreau eventually became aware that his audience extended far beyond Blake, who read the letters aloud to groups of friends and associates and may have told Thoreau he intended to publish them.

Blake's reverence grates as much as the constant humility of any admirer would. His friends described him as an ideal follower; the editor includes an anecdote in his introduction telling how, at a Harvard reunion, he said to a classmate, "Very glad to see you." "After moving on, however, he bethought himself, returned to the fellow, and quite seriously corrected his greeting by leaving off the intensifier: 'Glad to see you.'" Despite the shortcomings of the recipient, Thoreau's letters never fail to inspire.

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