Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Vintage, £8.99)

The Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard is most famous for A Death in the Family, a book about the seedy alcoholic demise and death of his father. It’s intense, stark and shocking. Also superb. This book is the third in a series of six, and it harks back to Knausgaard’s childhood, when he lived with his family on Tromoya, an island off the coast of Norway. On one level, it’s about the life of a kid — the routine embarrassments, the escapes, the friendships. On another it’s about being bullied by an angry, frustrated father who would later die the horrible, soiled death you already know about.

Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc) by Delia Ephron (Simon & Schuster, £7.99)

Delia Ephron writes screenplays (most notably for You’ve Got Mail, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan), novels, and children’s books. She’s the sister of Nora Ephron and the daughter of screenwriter Phoebe Ephron. Maybe she’s always been in their shadow. Here, she writes with frankness about their deaths. What emerges is a complex family picture — her mother’s drinking; her parents’ “drunken brawls and raging fights”; her sister’s success, and illness. “All siblings have different parents. We are all born at different times in our parents’ marriage.” A neat insight, and there are others.

The Everything Store by Brad Stone (Corgi, £8.99)

If you want to understand how modern business works, Amazon would be a good place to start. And if you want to understand Amazon, it’s important to get the measure of its founder, Jeff Bezos (pronounced Bay-zose, by the way, as Brad Stone reminds us). So: Bezos is exceptionally bright. He was educated at a school for gifted children in Houston, where he “developed a survey” of the teachers. Bezos’s raging intelligence drives this story. It’s about how to organise something really well. It’s about how communication is at the heart of business exchange. And how communication is changing. Excellent.