Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes (Vintage, £7.99)

Pat Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’s wife, died in 2008, and this book, in which Barnes writes about his grief, is one of the best, most moving things you’ll ever read. Every love story, he says, is a potential grief story: “Grief is the negative image of love.” He explains his grief with bracing courage, with unflinching precision — with real feeling. In grief, he says, “one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?” He tells us how he relates to his wife, during this time when he is living without her. Like a photograph, the negative develops; Barnes’s described grief becomes an image of his love.

Something Like Happy by John Burnside (Vintage, £8.99)

Very sharp, penetrating short stories; some of the best I’ve read for a while. You can tell they’re good after reading a couple of paragraphs of the first one. There is control. There is detail. In the title story, Burnside evokes the world of a young woman, and her sister, and her sister’s awful boyfriend, and it feels real. Then he tells a story from the point of view of a woman who is a victim of domestic violence, and you think: this is how it must feel. In another story, a man looks back at one moment in his life, something that happened when he was a boy, which involved a moment of tenderness, a beautiful woman and a sudden tragedy.

Talk Like Ted by Carmine Gallo (Macmillan, £12.99)

How do you feel about speaking in public? Maybe you’re terrified. Maybe you love the idea. If the first is true, you might find this book compelling; in the second case, fascinating. Ted talks (from the Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences) are often brilliant. Here, Gallo analyses them. How does a good speaker persuade us? By telling good stories. And how do you tell good stories? Aristotle said you had to appeal to ethos, logos, and pathos. Or, as Gallo says, credibility, logic, and emotion. But in what proportion? One of the best talks, she says, contained 10 per cent ethos, 25 per cent logos, and 65 per cent pathos. Persuasive.