Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

Under a Mackerel Sky by Rick Stein (Ebury, £7.99)

There is Rick Stein, the impeccable chef you see on TV, and there is Rick Stein the real person, who you’ll meet in this book. He was brought up on a farm in Oxfordshire. His family had a holiday home in Cornwall. The Steins were well-off. Rich, even. Stein boarded at Uppingham. His father’s family was German. The farm, and country life, taught the young Rick the serious facts about eating animals — the offal, the buckets full of guts. His father committed suicide. Stein tells you all of this — and about the girls, the love of rock ’n’ roll, the creation of restaurants — in a way that will make you like him.

Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm (Granta, £9.99)

Janet Malcolm has written books about psychoanalysis, about Sylvia Plath, and about murder; she approaches each subject with a sort of dry shrewdness that is brilliant and slightly addictive. Here she writes about artists and writers. She approaches each subject with the guile of a detective. In her piece on the conceptual artist David Salle she stalks something very elusive — conceptual art itself. In another essay, she explains why she thinks JD Salinger’s later work is much better than people think. She is shrewdness personified when it comes to better-off people in New York. Good on Virginia Woolf, too.

The Cancer Chronicles by George Johnson (Vintage, £8.99)

We’re in western Colorado, and the author, a science writer, is telling us about a fossilised dinosaur bone that he’s particularly interested in. Why? Because it “displays what might be the oldest known case of cancer.” He explains cancer in clear — and terrifying — terms. He has a lively scientific mind. Why do birds rarely get cancer? Do some tumours themselves get cancer? (“Cancer that can get cancer.”) When Johnson’s wife got cancer he wanted to understand the subject completely. He makes a very good job of it here. But in the end it’s still a mystery. Still a terrifying mystery.