In recent years, the work of Joseph Roth, Antal Szerb, Leonid Tsypkin and Stefan Zweig has been rediscovered, treating readers to some delightful "lost classics". Each of these minor Mitteleuropean writers has a unique voice to be treasured, despite the slightness of some of their work and the overindulgence of some critics. Max Blecher's Scarred Hearts comes to us packaged as just such a lost classic. It was his second and last novel (in 1937), and Paul Bailey's introduction tells us that Blecher's "elegant style" was compared to that of Kafka and Rilke. Bailey also calls the novel a "masterpiece".

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"Colonel" Cody was one of those magnificent men in their flying machines, and competed gloriously in the race that inspired the film of that name. Samuel Cody was a former American showman whose new frontier was the air. In his showbiz days, he put it about that he was "Buffalo Bill" Cody's son. The two did meet but his claim, like much in his early life, was a fib.

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Author Sir Salman Rushdie came to the High Court in London today to hear apologies from the writers and publishers of a book which they admitted contained falsehoods about his time under police protection.

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If you have a penchant for things that go bump in the night, our guide to the best thrillers should provide a spooky read.

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Sulaiman Addonia's first novel is a spirited and politically provocative romance set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1989. Nasser, a young Eritrean refugee, is lonely and at a loose end. His uncle and brother have moved to Riyadh and his friends have gone on holiday. Religious police patrol the eerily silent streets in jeeps, watching for any hint of impropriety through shaded windows.

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There are those who maintain that Americans don't understand irony. James Frey (inset) does, or he couldn't have given this book such an optimistic title. It is the second-grimmest book about America of recent years: the first was his widely-acclaimed so-called memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which proved to be largely invented and caused a furore. Eventually, people who bought it were offered their money back: some took up the offer.

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Classic "reversal" narratives include William Golding's Lord of the Flies, in which civilised children play savage adults, Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, in which animal rules man, and Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle, in which a black character escapes into slavery. Conceptually, Blonde Roots surpasses all of the aforesaid provocation, creating a world in which Europeans are beasts of burden under the rule of African plantation overlords who wield untold power and wealth. They own language and geography too. They call Africa "Aphrika", whites "whytes" and the West Indies "the West Japanese Islands".

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What's in a name? For Sloane Crosley, both burden and liberation; as a child she disdains her name for its oddness, but as a young adult seeking to distinguish herself from humdrum suburban existence, welcomes it as a mark of originality.

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Corley Roper is a man in turmoil. He has lost his daughter and is in danger of losing his mind and his marriage. He is a children's author who has spent his life writing about talking animals, but bereavement has paralysed his creativity. Instead, Corley has been wandering through woods, wild rhododendrons and his own spiritual wasteland, only vaguely aware that hunger and solitude are about to unhinge him.

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"Always be strong," is the advice given to Erich by his late father, killed in combat. Both physical and mental strength must be summoned by Erich, his brother, Zeppi, and mother, Helga, during their perilous journey from post-war Germany to Venezuela, where the nervous Helga marries her brother-in-law, Klaus. Their plane crashes in the jungle, and the native Yayomi tribe believe that the family are terrestrial incarnations of magical dolphins, a story encouraged by the anthropologist who lives amongst them.

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No, not the director of The Draughtsman's Contract. This author was a lawyer-turned-novelist who wrote popular fiction in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, producing at least 20 thrillers and volumes of short stories that were by turns topical, political, satirical, hilarious and rather mysterious. When he died in 1988 it seemed that his books died with him, which is a shame because, at his best, he wrote popular fiction with a rare passion and erudition.

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John Berger's output is erratic in quality. At best and most brilliant it is challenging, philosophical, deeply intellectual. At worst, though, Berger's prose can be wearily self-derivative; unfortunately, this new novel falls into the latter category.

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"A writer needs a strong passion to change things," asserts Roger Deakin in his "Notebooks", as he eloquently probes the poignant roots of his own fascination with trees. A sense of urgency pervades these evocative essays, stories and photographs; we must change our appreciation of the delicate environments in which we live, cease damaging and instead preserve and cultivate their beauty – which might first mean improving ourselves.

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Penelope Fitzgerald has a strong claim to be the least known great British novelist of the last quarter of the 20th century. This collection of letters casts little light on the creative processes that produced the distinctive fiction of her later years, such as her final masterpiece, The Blue Flower. She was, after all, notably reticent about her writing, remarking after one, slightly awkward, encounter with an interviewer that "He told me he found me a rather difficult job but the truth was I couldn't think of very much to say." But her letters do offer an essential guide, perhaps better than any biography could do, to the unusual trajectory of Fitzgerald's professional life as a writer, and to the diffidence which remained one of her most striking characteristics long after she achieved the kind of success which most writers only dream about.

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There's a photo of me on holiday. I look happy enough, but I can't remember the picture being taken, and four-year-olds are quite easily amused, so who can say what I'm smiling at? The photo was taken in Bognor, that working-class playground of the 1960s. I haven't been back since. I haven't been to many places since. Originally, it was because I didn't have the option. The early 1970s may be remembered as the dawn of the package-tour era, but they also hosted a financially straitened winter of discontent that seemed to span a decade: for people like me, holidays – like cars, central heating and jeans with the label on the outside – were something others had. I wasn't to appear in another holiday photo for over 30 years.

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Hippy dreams crumble into nightmare in this lively, well-researched novel. On the day of his finals in economics, Anand discovers that he has inherited the Lux Hotel in Calcutta, and, happy to forego Edward Heath's England – atmospherically evoked – he fantasises about transforming it into a utopia for literary types. But his grand plans don't add up, as he returns to an India poised on the brink of war.

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Ruth Rendell's eyes exert a fascination on those who meet her. Glacial, piercing and unforgiving are adjectives used by interviewers. Yet as she greets me in the entrance to the House of Lords, I find them oddly warm, like those of a strict but fair schoolmistress. At 78, she is trim and elegant. With an expression that hovers somewhere between a smile and a reprimand, she guides me through the security checks and on into the Peers' Family Room. My preconceptions are dismissed in a moment.

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The business model under which the music industry has given us great pop music for more than half a century is defunct; you don't have to be the head of EMI to know that. The rise of file-sharing and the death of the physical formats – CDs and their antecedents – will change things forever, but nobody knows how. Meanwhile our shelves fill up with book upon book about music, almost without exception backwards-looking, dripping with nostalgia and awe for past glories. So this new book by Bill Drummond arrives like a flying saucer from a benevolent alien planet. It's the most thrilling book written about music I've read for years. It's defiantly, bracingly polemical; it might even be prophetic.

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It's widely believed – at least among readers of The Spectator and the Telegraphs – that The Guardian's high-minded social affairs columnist Polly Toynbee owns half of Gloucestershire and a considerable slice of Tuscany. Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail frequently fantasises about her in a pole-dancing role. And a fortnight ago, The Times' winsome restaurant columnist Giles Coren described her as a "sour old Trot".

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