Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead (Granta, £9.99)

At the age of 17, Rebecca Mead tells us, she became fascinated by George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The book is at least partly about a young woman desperate to inject some meaning into her life. Almost 30 years on, Mead looks back at Middlemarch, which she has read over and over. In middle age, she says, she feels “a sense of doors closing behind me, alternative lives unlived”. She does something fascinating; she examines the book from the different perspectives of her own life. An excellent work of criticism that I would recommend to any student of literature.

Htler’s Furies by Wendy Lower (Vintage, £9.99)

I’ve read many books about Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. On one level, they’re all trying to answer the same question. How did this happen to a whole population? Wendy Lower concentrates on women in the Third Reich. She tells us about the Nazi ideal of womanhood — healthy, outdoorsy, natural, no make-up; but also subservient. The Nazis wanted to “emancipate women from woman’s emancipation”. We learn about Nazi secretaries and nurses, some of whom “consoled German SS policemen and soldiers who recoiled from the experience of shooting victims at close range”.

Evil Eye by Joyce Carol Oates (Head of Zeus, £7.99)

A young woman marries an older man. She’s twenty-odd; he’s pushing 60. She’s vulnerable and rootless; he seems assured. She’s his fourth wife. They live in the hills above San Fransisco. He’s an academic. Then one day his first wife appears. She takes the new wife aside and says some sinister things. The first wife appears to be missing an eye. The new wife asks the husband why he didn’t mention the missing eye. He says he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This is the first of four novellas — in another, a young girl falls for a disturbed guy; in another a young man plans a murder. Very creepy.