Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, £8.99)

Ann Patchett is a terrific novelist; here she writes about herself. She tells us about all sorts of things — marriage, divorce, her friendship with a poet called Lucy Grealy, who had cancer of the jaw, and wrote a book about it, and died. Patchett’s father was a cop in the LAPD. She writes about him, and the police, with great aplomb. She rides with a pair of cops in their car; it’s a great story. You keep thinking: what a good writer! She has great range, great control, great storytelling. She also writes about writing itself. Once or twice she reminded me of Joan Didion.

The Click Moment by Frans Johansson (Portfolio Penguin, £9.99)

I picked this book up thinking I might whizz through a few pages and then probably put it aside. The title, the cover; it looks like so many other books. How the brain works, how the world works, how to be successful. But I didn’t stop reading. And I learned a lot — this is a sharp, clear account of many things that lots of similar books are trying to say. This one says them crisply and well. To be successful you have to understand that we live in a world that changes all the time. And these days it’s changing faster than ever. Even though we still want it to be predictable. With lots of case studies, including Starbucks, Nokia and Diane von Furstenberg’s wrap dress.

Life at the Speed of Light by J Craig Venter (Abacus, £9.99)

J Craig Venter is the scientist who managed, somehow, to create life. That’s right. He got some things that were not alive and put them together and made something that was alive. Can this be true? This is his account. He and his lab team were accused of “playing God”. He says: “In the restricted sense that we had shown with this experiment that God was unnecessary for the creation of new life, I suppose that we were.” He gives us a history of his scientific precursors — those who imagined, discovered and tinkered with the genetic code. Good to read about these scientific giants by a man who is their equal.