Paperbacks: The Nose <br></br>Memoirs of a Beatnik <br></br>Grabbing the Family Jewels <br></br>The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes <br></br>Nothing to Lose

The Nose, by Elena Lappin (Picador, £6.99, 228pp)

Elena Lappin is a writer whose company guarantees you a good time. Her first collection of fiction, Foreign Brides, was a comic and cosmopolitan take on the theme of Jewish exile – a series of stories about young women whose marriages had left them high and dry, usually in deepest north London. Her first novel features a transplanted heroine happy with her adopted surroundings. A New York Jewish intellectual of "solid eccentric ancestry", Natasha Kaplan has somehow ended up married to a British Transport policeman, keeping house in an "uncomplicated" London suburb. The mother of a young daughter, she accepts a freelance job editing a stodgy Jewish cultural magazine, The Nose of the title. Within weeks she finds herself embroiled in a mystery that involves not only the wartime past of the magazine's founding editor, Franz Held, but that of her own, Prague-born, mother. Herself a former editor of the Jewish Quarterly, Lappin does a convincing job of satirising life on The Nose. Particularly well-drawn are its more determined contributors – among them the non-Jewish poet, Nigel Pearce (author of such ditties as "The Jewish Fate": "A crying mother/ a caring bloke/ one by one/ went up in smoke"), and a host of Highgate culture-vultures. It's only when the book evolves from social comedy into something more ambitious that Lappin's lightness of touch falters. As Natasha becomes involved in unearthing Nazi atrocities, her domestic story gets buried under the weight. Lappin's generous novel, like the letters page of The Nose, suffers from having too much to say, and only a limited space in which to say it.

Memoirs of a Beatnik, Diane di Prima (Marion Boyars, £8.99, 194pp)

With more wall-to-wall sex than any feminist fiction ever, Diane di Prima's 1969 novel recalling life among the beatniks still retains its shock value and freshness of touch. A second generation Italian-American, di Prima was educated at New York's exclusive Hunter College High School and Swarthmore College, but dropped out at the age of 18 to live and write in New York's Greenwich Village. This semi-autobiographical book charts a young girl's induction into "Cool" – a trip which largely seems to have consisted of bi-curious encounters in West Village studios and couplings in Connecticut barns.

Grabbing the Family Jewels, by Gaby Hauptmann (Virago, £6.99, 312pp)

Disappointingly conventional fare in comparison to her first novel, In Search of an Impotent Man, Hauptmann's latest Teutonic romp is set among the dysfunctional siblings of an über-wealthy German clan. The family patriarch, retired industrialist Anno Adelmann, is the survivor of four heart attacks. Aware that his four daughters have designs on his inheritance, he takes up with an unmarried mother who is younger and smarter than any of them. Plenty of scope for Fay Weldon-esque subversion, but in spite of Hauptmann's playfulness, this Black Forest farce, rather like Adelmann himself, never quite rises to the occasion.

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, by Jonathan Rose (Yale University Press, £12.99)

No one who reads this magnificent book will ever use the word "elitist" to designate challenging culture or ideas again. Universally, and rightly, lauded in hardback, Rose's panoramic and moving history of the autodidact tradition illuminates a vanished past. His treatment of a cast of plain-living, high-thinking working people, from the Victorians to the Sixties, shows how a deep interest in literature, politics and science enriched not only their own lives but British society as a whole. Rose introduces us to countless characters such as Alfred Willliams, a machinist in the 1890s Swindon railway workshops, who taught himself Greek and Latin, and then translated Ovid, Sappho, Plato and Horace. By the way, Celebrity Big Brother continues this weekend.

Nothing to Lose, by Tania Kindersley (Sceptre, £6.99, 308pp)

Kindersley's fourth novel is that rare beast, a well-written love story for grown-ups. Maud Strong, the book's shut-down heroine, is a ghostwriter of celebrity biographies. For the past 10 years she has hidden herself away in her west London flat, following a road accident in which she ran over a small boy. Lured out of her solitude by a chance encounter, she takes a trip to Scotland and starts work on a new subject: a man with a secret as uncomfortable as her own. An elegiac page-turner.