Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

The Quarry by Iain Banks (Abacus, £7.99)

Shortly before he died of cancer, aged 59, Iain Banks wrote this book about a man called Guy, who is dying of cancer, and his son Kit, who has Asperger’s or something similar. Apparently Banks finished the novel before he was diagnosed; reading this, you wonder if he wrote it under the spell of some kind of authorial sixth sense. Perhaps his inner storyteller was gripped with his worst fears. In any case, this is, like all of Banks’s work, eerily compelling. Kit and Guy live in a crumbling old house next to a quarry; the quarry is encroaching on the house, like a terminal disease. So Guy invites all his old friends for a visit before it’s too late.

Careless People by Sarah Churchwell (Virago, £9.99)

The Great Gatsby, by F Scott Fitzgerald, was published in 1925 but set in the summer and autumn of 1922. It’s a superb work about wealth and unhappiness, and how the aspirations of modern life don’t quite add up. Here, Sarah Churchwell tells the story of how the novel came into being. Or rather, she attempts, with huge success, to recreate that moment in 1922 when Fitzgerald’s ideas came together. She really places us in New York and on Long Island in the world of Prohibition, bootleggers, early motor cars, and the dawn of radio. It’s a perfect book to read alongside The Great Gatsby. Excellent.

Brief Loves That Live Forever by Andrei Makine (Maclehose, £8.99)

At first you might think these stories set in post-Stalin Russia, by a man who lived through the era, are grim. Open the book and you’re straight into a story about a man who, having been released from the gulag, is wracked with cancer, coughing himself to death, while he tries to explain his insights into what makes a totalitarian regime tick. But what Makine does can be powerful — you see shafts of humanity shining through the bleakness. Here, there are people who are famous for having once met Lenin; there are ugly buildings, bad meals, and people falling in love.