Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis (Penguin, £9.99)

Michael Lewis is always telling us, quite brilliantly, about two types of people: the smart guys who invent new ways of doing things, and the dinosaurs who get left behind. In Moneyball, the smart guys found a way of understanding sport by looking at statistics. In The Big Short, the smart guys found a way of making money from the global financial crash. Here, the scary thing is that the smart guys are not actually people — they’re machines. This is a book about how, these days, financial markets are run by machines trading with each other. We, the humans, are the dinosaurs. Genuinely frightening.

The Girls from Corona del Mar by Rufi Thorpe (Windmill, £7.99)

A moving story, beautifully written, about the friendship between two girls who later become two very different women. Mia and Lorrie Ann are kids in California. “Lorrie Ann and I often joked that my heart was nothing but a small, dark stone,” Mia tells us. On the other hand, Lorrie Ann seems “beautiful, pure and good”. But then terrible things begin to happen to Lorrie Ann. I won’t say what, but does the first terrible thing lead to the second, and the second to the third? Mia, the extremely intelligent narrator, will make you think about friendship, luck, and the way we see the lives of others though our own eyes. I loved it.

Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers (Penguin, £9.99)

Plain Words is about how to write so that people understand you. The author, Ernest Gowers, was a top civil servant and private secretary to David Lloyd George when he was the Chancellor before the First World War. After that he was the boss of the Inland Revenue, and senior regional commissioner for civil defence for London during the Blitz. A man, in other words, whose life depended on making himself clear. This book, first published in 1948, tells you how to write. You need to know what you think, say what you mean and make your reader grasp it. A much more difficult thing than you might think. Updated by the author’s great-grand-daughter.