Hotel Honolulu <br></br>Hockney on 'Art' <br></br>Glue <br></br>The Bloody English Women of the Maison Puce <br></br>A Day Late and a Dollar Short <br></br>The Author of Himself

Hotel Honolulu, by Paul Theroux (Penguin, £6.99, 441pp)

"Nothing to me is so erotic as a hotel room." So says the novel's world-weary narrator, and there's a lot of sex – the kind middle-aged novelists are interested in – between the covers of Paul Theroux's flamboyant new book. Like his creator, the narrator is a writer by trade, but after 30 years in the business, and with a history of family and friends behind him ("other people were now sitting in lovely chairs I had bought and looking at paintings I used to own, hung on walls I paid for"), he finds himself all too happily washed up in Hawaii.

Jettisoning his career as a novelist, he ends up, rather improbably, managing a beach-front hotel. Theroux himself has described the book as a cross between Seinfeld and The Canterbury Tales, and life's rich tapestry certainly comes picked out in Pacific-bright colours. As each new visitor arrives, the bookish narrator can't help but snoop around for personal details. Soon we are intimates to everyone's secret history – from Pinky, a Filipino mail-order bride, to the elderly Mrs Bunny Arkle (a widow with Wallis Simpson-like sexual credentials) and Trey, the hotel's surfing bartender.

The most memorable creation, however, is Buddy Hamstra, the multi-millionaire hotel owner, whose catch phrases include "I'm a crude sumbitch" and "Never jack off a dog". In a novel of "orchidaceous" landscapes and lush language (the Polynesian patois shimmies across the page), the island-hopping Theroux checks in to a non-literary culture with decidedly literary results.

Hockney on 'Art': conversations with Paul Joyce (Little, Brown, £19.99).

In this charmingly digressive collection of chats, the Bradford lad turned LA style icon turns his immaculate eye (and slightly more questionable taste) on visual matters from the Grand Canyon to Picasso, digital photography to opera set design. Almost an autobiography in images, adorned with a lavish gallery of works by Hockney himself and his favourite artists.

Glue, by Irvine Welsh (Vintage, £6.99, 556pp)

Irvine Welsh's sixth novel is his most conventional to date – a surprisingly sentimental story about four boys growing up on a Seventies Edinburgh housing scheme. In a series of gabby monologues (at which Welsh excels), Terry, Billy, Carl and Gally talk us through their lives, from the days of cosy pre-pubescence (when their mums made the best chips), through to the frustrations and failed relationships of early adulthood. In mature mode, Welsh looks at the lives of a group of not-so-young men whose major preoccupations – sex, "fitba", ecstasy, alcohol and each other – haven't changed since adolescence.

The Bloody English Women of the Maison Puce, by Jill Laurimore (Penguin, £6.99, 376pp)

Jill Laurimore succeeds almost too well in her fictional portrait of the middle-class, middle-aged Englishwoman at play. Her Russell and Bromley-shod heroines, transplanted into Côte d'Azur café society, go ga-ga over the authentic market stalls, and pore embarrassingly over their unruly bikini lines. But if you can withstand such moments, the story of Alice Barnes, a Bath housewife who after 29 years of marriage impulse-buys a tiny flat on the Riviera, is a good one. Concerns about how "Aleese" will survive the drab austerities of her new flat, or her new neighbours, start to take over in this dose of Franco wish-fulfilment.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short, by Terry McMillan (Penguin, £6.99, 416pp)

"I still can't believe they all came out of my body," remarks 54-year-old Viola Price from the relative peace of her hospital bed. Contemplating the fates of her four now grown-up children, she decides to let go of the "coulda-woulda-shouldas" of motherhood, and admit defeat. As the dominant voice in this emotionally alert family saga, Viola has opinions on everything from Rodney King to French furniture. In the face of such conviction, her talented but stressed-out offspring can only quail. Back in fine fettle after her girlie bestseller How Stella Got Her Groove Back, McMillan returns to the uncomfortable bosom of family life.

The Author of Himself, by Marcel Reich-Ranicki, trans. Ewald Osers (Phoenix, £7.99, 407pp)

In 1958, Günter Grass asked Marcel Reich-Ranicki, "What are you, really?" This fine memoir of an astonishing life gives the answer. Born a Polish Jew, young Marcel survived the Warsaw Ghetto (evoked here in some classic chapters), served Poland's post-war Communist rulers, and then fled to Germany. There he became a formidable critic and pundit, whose judgment makes writers quake not just in print but on a top-rating TV show too. Once, he met Yehudi Menuhin in China: both were spreading the glories of German culture, in music and in words. Reflected Sir Yehudi: "Ah well, we're Jews, of course."