Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (Corgi, £8.99)

It’s 1980. A French guy in Africa goes into a cave full of animals and gets infected by a virus. Not just any virus — a filovirus, the most terrifying kind. Marburg is a filovirus. So is Ebola. The French guy gets a headache. Then his face stiffens up and goes spotty. After a few days he is in the throes of “black vomit”. His insides are liquefying. This is a terrifying account of viral infection. It reads like a thriller. The physical details disgust and appal but you keep reading. There’s a scene in a lab in which a woman with a cut hand is cutting up an infected monkey. Then she notices a hole in her protective gear. Compelling.

The Animals by Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy (Vintage, £14.99)

Christopher Isherwood is probably most famous for writing Goodbye to Berlin, the book that became the 1972 film Cabaret. He met the American painter Don Bachardy, the love of his life, in 1953, when he was 49; Bachardy was 30 years younger. Here are their love letters. It all feels very intimate, as if you’re spying on them, but you learn a lot — about love, what life was like in the middle of the last century, creativity and money. Isherwood is a very good letter-writer. Bachardy’s not bad at all. They call each other Dobbin and Kitty, hence the title. Isherwood is the horse, Bachardy the cat. “I envy no one,” writes Isherwood.

Daily Rituals by Mason Currey (Picador, £8.99)

In this book about the working habits of creative people we learn that Simone de Beauvoir would wake up, have a cup of tea and write for three hours. Then she’d have lunch with Jean-Paul Sartre, and start work again at five. Francis Bacon, on the other hand, woke very early, painted for a few hours and then drank. Cumulatively, these details become fascinating. Ingmar Bergman ate jam, cream and cornflakes for lunch. Thomas Mann smoked a set number of cigarettes per day — 12 — and two cigars. John Updike wrote for three or four hours every morning. Sylvia Plath found a steady routine but only at the end of her life.