Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

The Dog by Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate, £8.99)

An exquisite book. A novel of beautiful, intricate writing and ideas of real value. It’s about an American guy living in a luxury block in Dubai. Our narrator’s tower is called The Situation and is close to two neighbouring towers, The Aspiration and The Statement. He tells us what it is like to live in a place of huge wealth and inequality. He explains what it does to your head. He is cold and sort of horrible. We begin to wonder why he has come to this place — then we find out. (One of the cruellest break-ups in fiction.) We also wonder what will become of him. Then, on the last page, we find out.

Eyrie by Tim Winton (Picador, £8.99)

A man wakes up in a tower block in Western Australia. He is “not himself”. He is desperately out of sorts. He’s been drinking. Heavily. There’s a suspicious wet stain on his carpet. He has no idea how it got there. He ventures out but collapses. This is Tom Keely, a former spokesman for green issues. He’s fallen from grace. Tim Winton inhabits Keely’s self-loathing with brutal precision. Keely disgusts himself. And then he meets Gemma, a hard-bitten woman from his past. Gemma has a boy, not her own, but the son of her incarcerated daughter. Now Keely begins to come back to life. You sense hope.

A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson (Vintage, £8.99)

Let’s say there are about eight million different species of life on Earth. A million of these are insects. This is a book about them. Dave Goulson, a professor of biology, makes them fascinating. He has a real gift for explaining about them. They have three sections: head, thorax, abdomen. They have six legs. They are “sex machines”. He tells us of the undersea world of trilobites and giant scorpions that existed before insects and of how creatures came to colonise dry land. His descriptions of the bugs, bees and ants in his own French farmyard (and owls and snakes too) are animated and compelling.