Paperbacks
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The first paperbacks of the new year offer rich pickings, from Barnes’s meditation on Shostakovitch to Jefferson’s memoir of growing up in the US’s black elite
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Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: Ranging from a single paragraph to 40-odd pages, these stories of strange animals and clerks oppressed by bouncing balls are richly rewarding
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A powerful, nuanced story of the complicated friendship between two boys in wartime Switzerland
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Children make their parents and gods speak from inkpots in Rob Davis’s dystopic take on a coming of age tale
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From showbiz anecdotes to illness and exploitation, this autobiography gives us Bohemia with the petals falling off
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Marge Piercy, the landmark feminist novel’s author, reflects on the aspirations for a just society that she dramatised in 1976 – and their continuing relevance
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s haunting The Buried Giant, Adam Mars-Jones’s hilarious memoir and Sydney Padua’s eye-opening graphic novel are some of this year’s highlights
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Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: bold and honest, hilarious and despairing, this graphic memoir from the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast carefully chronicles the demise of her parents
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Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: the devastation of postwar Germany as seen through the eyes of cultural figures such as Auden, Orwell and Lee Miller
Nicholas Lezard's choice The Dedalus Book of Gin by Richard Barnett review – a spirited read