Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: illuminating Sterne, Proust and Joyce, this deft collection takes our understanding down new paths

Teen angst, the Holocaust and being Beckett’s goddaughter intertwine in this revelatory family memoir

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: this superb sequel gives us the detective story as existential crisis

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: this harrowing collection drawn from a youth spent in an orphanage delights in language as a place of private escape

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: the bestselling author pens vivid portraits from his time in MI6 and of his unreliable father

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: a monumental history that shows the birth of the age of reason in an era of cruelty and folklore

An entertaining look at breeds as various as the flightless kagu and clever corvids

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: a playful novel imagining the French novelist in contemporary life – every sentence is a delight

A collection of introductions, articles and essays includes insights into Alan Moore, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett

Scientific historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz show how our society has been ecologically dangerous for far longer than you might think

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: newly translated, this heady novel reveals the decadant, suffocating lives of le beau monde in belle époque France

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: sensitive and faithful, this book charts the last hours of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: an absurdist tale of a useless, cheese-hating clerk who tries to become ... a cheese merchant

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: The last work Heaney finished before he died in 2013, this stirring translation of the best book in the Latin epic poem takes us into the underworld

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: a personal survey of class in Britain that should be essential reading in the Brexit era

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: an entertaining look at the drink’s history – complete with ‘Hogarth-rating’ tasting notes

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: wince-inducing stories of amputations without anaesthesia and sinister policies to withhold drugs from sections of society

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: There are shades of David Lynch, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter in this collection of feminist allegories and surreal skits

Nicholas Lezard’s paperback of the week: Ranging from a single paragraph to 40-odd pages, these stories of strange animals and clerks oppressed by bouncing balls are richly rewarding

A classic story about pugilists and poverty in 1950s California hits hard nearly five decades on