Sucking Shrimp <br></br>Good Girl's Guide to Negotiating <br></br>A Sport and a Pastime <br></br>Adam and Even and Pinch Me <br></br>Britain Unwrapped

Paperbacks

Sucking Shrimp, by Stephanie Theobald (Flame, £6.99, 370pp)

A writer who recommends hard-core porn bedtime stories for adults, Stephanie Theobald takes her readers to a more exotic place. Her début novel, Biche, was a raunchy education sentimentale about an English girl's bisexual adventures in Paris. Her second novel is more of the same – the coming of age of a West Country teenager who exchanges life above her parent's pasty shop for the bohemian delights of down-town Barcelona.

Fourteen-year-old Rosa Barge's first contact with the romance of abroad is via the recipes of Fanny Craddock, whose descriptions of crêpe Suzette and tournedos Rossini speak to her of foreign adventures and Ambre Solaire-basted bodies. Marooned in an oppressive world of provincial expectations, Rosa escapes into an intense friendship with camp classmate Jack and his mother, the alluring Mrs Flowers, who takes it upon herself to educate Rosa in matters continental.

In contrast to Biche, which captured the excited vibe of a group of friends living together in a foreign capital, Sucking Shrimp lingers too long in Blighty waiting for Rosa's real adventure to begin. The most emotionally engaging section of the novel – when Rosa finally makes it to Spain and falls in love with sun, sea, carajillo and Magali (a temperamental older woman) – is unfairly saved for the last few chapters.

A talented writer, with plenty to say about cultural and sexual divides, Theobald gets distracted by Fanny's Seventies cuisine, instead of serving up what she does best – a frightening foreign broth complete with all the "tentacle-y, floaty bits".

Good Girl's Guide to Negotiating, by Leslie Whitaker and Elizabeth Austin (Arrow, £6.99, 272pp)

How do you get out of taking the school hamster home for the holidays, or saying no to another viewing of Goldmember? Journalists Whitaker and Austin give the low-down on how to negotiate effectively without being thought a bitch. Given its American bias, the emphasis is on matters financial – how to arrange your pre-nup settlement, get a better deal on a new car, negotiate a pay raise, or arrange the funeral you want. A surprisingly helpful self-help book – though some might hesitate before putting into practice the duo's advice on handling the enraged male at work. Just raise your index finger and go "no no no no no no". Apparently, it works a treat.

A Sport and a Pastime, by James Salter (Vintage, £6.99, 192pp)

This classic postwar novella of Americans in Europe demands to be read with Miles Davis playing softly in the background, and a curl of Gauloises smoke overhead. In the sad September of a French provincial town, a golden boy from Yale has an affair with a young, but far from naive, shopgirl. James Salter (writing in the early Sixties) turns up the erotic temperature to a torrid setting that recalls Nin as much as Hemingway. Then passion fades, leaves fall, existential melancholy creeps in like mist ... Every element sounds a cliché now, but Salter's fierce, fastidious prose redeems the lot.

Adam and Even and Pinch Me, by Ruth Rendell (Arrow, £6.99, 442pp)

Although you can be sure that a Ruth Rendell novel will transport you into a cosy world of suburban weirdos and domestic crime, after 40 years the weirdos are beginning to sound uncomfortably familiar. This novel's central character is a conman who trades on the gullibility of his three victims: Minty, a recluse with an obsessive compulsive disorder; Fiona, a successful professional; and Zillah, a young mother who agrees to marry a gay Tory MP in exchange for a flat. When the mysterious anti-hero is murdered, the novel turns into a classic whodunnit – though by that stage it's hard to believe in the characters or their all-too-artfully contrived circumstances.

Britain Unwrapped, by Hilaire Barnett (Penguin, £10.99, 632pp

Buy this book, and it could turn out to be the most valuable tenner (and a bit) you'll ever spend. Academic lawyer Hilaire Bennett plunges into the fathomless pool of the British constitution, and comes up with a clear, full, up-to-date and incredibly useful account of how it all works (or doesn't). The EU, devolution, human rights, the law, elections, councils, foreign affairs: she finds method in the piecemeal madness of the UK as a legal entity, and so helps us make the best of it. Now Europe has turned our ancient tangle into a game of constitutional 3D chess, Barnett shows the killer moves.