Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

An Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins (Black Swan, £8.99)

Not long after I opened this memoir, I felt the familiar grip of the Dawkins style. He describes his family as “not a particularly rich family, but we weren’t poor either”. The 1958 Dawkins family photograph with the 1774 Dawkins family portrait in the background is telling. His was a background of expensive schools and cheap holidays; the austerity of 20th-century poshness. At Oundle, “I had to fend off nocturnal visits to my bed from senior boys much larger and stronger than I was.” The way he describes Oxford colleges as “beautiful old buildings” that “mostly don’t have horizontally running corridors” is somehow perfect.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Arrow, £7.99)

It's 1895, in Paris, and an army officer called Alfred Dreyfus is convicted of treason. We’re seeing this through the eyes of Georges Picquart, another army officer; he’s rather smart, single and a bit raffish. We know the Dreyfus conviction is dodgy, and Picquart, who runs the army intelligence squad, begins to suspect the same thing. As you would expect, Harris tells this story with peerless expertise: the suspense starts immediately and never lets up. He’s great on the spying techniques of the time; it might remind you of an oldfashioned version of the TV series Homeland — in a good way.

Turned On by Lucy Dent (Black Swan, £7.99)

Lucy Dent, not the author’s real name, tells the story in the first person of a woman who gets deeply involved with online relationships. Why? Well, there she is, in a chatroom, telling a stranger she’s naked. Meanwhile, her husband, who sleeps in a different room, snores away, oblivious. The night passes quickly. The husband wakes up. Dent hears the sounds of his ablutions — the shower, the toothbrush, “a sustained fart”. She tells us about her depressive mum. And also her mostly absent father (“Ken Loach territory”). And the chance meeting with her future husband, who was nice but drank and loved racing. Sad. And compelling.