Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

9 May 2014

The Lie by Helen Dunmore (Windmill, £7.99)

It's 1920, and a man digs a grave beside an old stone cottage. Then he buries the old lady who had lived and died in the cottage, and moves in. He keeps her death a secret. We’re on the Cornish coast. The man is a veteran of the trenches; he is furtive and feral. Post-war, he can’t quite integrate back into the world. He has flashes of intense memory — the violence, the dead men, the mud. The mud! “Thick, almost oily, full of shit and rotten flesh, cordite and chloride of lime.” He remembers the visceral facts of using the bayonet. It reminded me of the poems of Wilfred Owen — moving and intense.

The Circle by Dave Eggers (Penguin, £8.99)

Mae is a smart 24-year-old who gets a job at the Circle, a company in Silicon Valley. When I say a company, I mean THE company — imagine Google, Facebook and Microsoft added together, and multiply by about 10. The Circle is a digital company that has swallowed everything up. Eggers makes you wonder if this might actually happen — what if one company, with one super-fabulous campus, began to control everything? Mae is, of course, happy to get a job at the Circle. And it is, indeed, an awesome place to work. But it’s creepy. It’s spying on everybody. Eggers is great. You keep thinking: this might happen!

The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida (Sceptre, £8.99)

Before I read this book, I thought I had a working idea of what autism was. I didn’t. Now, I think, I do. Higashida, who wrote this when he was 13, tells us something we don’t normally hear — what it feels like to be autistic. “It’s troubled me for quite a while that I can’t laugh along when everyone else is laughing,” he writes. He says his sense of humour is different. “If we’re surprised, or feel tense, or embarrassed, we just freeze up and become unable to show any emotion whatsoever.” The introduction, by the novelist David Mitchell, who has an autistic child, is excellent.