Paperbacks: Unsung Heroes of American Industry<br></br>Miles McGinty<br></br>The Brothers<br></br>Answer Me<br></br>Unless

Unsung Heroes of American Industry by Mark Poirier (Bloomsbury, £9.99, 169pp)

Home to some of the world's more bizarre cottage industries, Americans have always known how to make a buck out of thin air. Mark Poirier's second collection of stories explores the secret lives of some particularly unsavoury entrepreneurs – from the Texan worm-breeder with very dirty fingernails, to a fast-food technician with a taste for Eastern European porn.

The collection's opening story, "Buttons", is the tale of twin brothers who try to make their fortune with the invention of a new breakfast product known as "F'neggs", star-shaped scrambled eggs for kids. The brothers spend years studying chicken husbandry and hormone manipulation to achieve the perfect result. F'neggs soon become a national craze, outselling Frank Perdue and Oscar Mayer in the supermarket freezer section. It's not long, however, before urban myths start to circulate about the eggy formula's toxic consequences: everything from causing little girls' heads to implode, to "making Ricky Martin gay".

As with all the stories in the book, Poirier's protagonists are unable to escape their odd career choices, or any variety of psycho-sexual problems. In the story "Worms", a worm farmer falls for a reporter fresh out of Vassar with weirdly grubby consequences. Poirier has often written about the Southwest's dippier inhabitants. His latest misfits are too degenerate to believe in, but too well described not to want to find out what dubious activity they will get up to next.

Miles McGinty by Tom Gilling (Review, £6.99, 198pp)

for anyone defeated by Peter Carey's hefty antipodean tomes, Tom Gilling's pared-down version of 19th-century Down Under may be the answer. His first novel, The Sooterkin, was about a woman who gave birth to a seal. This second novel opens with an equally unusual delivery: an actress goes into labour on stage, triggering the contractions of a woman in the audience. The babies are born into very different social worlds, but grow up sharing a fascination with ballooning and flying machines. Not as whimsical as it sounds, Gilling evokes colonial vaudeville and Victorian quackerie without the usual song and dance.

The Brothers by Milton Hatoum (Bloomsbury, £6.99, 272pp)

Set in the Brazilian port of Manaus – a bustling city in the middle of tropical rainforest – Hatoum's second novel unfolds among the displaced members of its Lebanese community. That the location is as alien to these Middle-Eastern newcomers as it is to the reader, only serves to underline the novel's exotic edge. Returning from war service in the Lebanon, 18-year-old Yaqub takes up his old life with his twin brother, Omar, and his mother. The twins vie for their mother's affection and what starts off as an impenetrable family saga soon develops into full-blown classical tragedy.

Answer Me by Susanna Tamaro (Vintage, £6.99, 165pp)

Italian novelist Susanna Tamaro was accused of plagiarism when this trio of novellas first appeared on the shelves. The collection's title story, "Answer Me", was said to be drawn directly from an autobiographical novel by Ippolita Avalli. In both books a young girl survives a miserable coming of age in northern Italy, throws a tantrum during mass and escapes on a bike. Fact or fiction, it's easy to see why Tamaro's bleakly atmospheric tales of life by the auto-strada, and her portentous pronouncements on love, life and Catholicism became such a runaway bestseller. The surrounding controversy only fuelled her success.

Unless by Carol Shields (Fourth Estate, £6.99, 320pp)

"My heart is broken" writes the middle-aged narrator of Shields' most angry novel, on a slate for "washroom graffiti" in a public toilet. A successful writer of middle-brow fiction with an unruffled domestic existence, Reta Winters finds her world exploding when her eldest daughter drops out of college to protest on a street corner. With breathtaking precision, elegance and compassion, Shields charts her painful quest for the true meaning of abstractions like "happiness" and "goodness" in a novel that is, finally, a masterful exploration of "the big female secret of wanting and not getting".