Yes, the scales tilt towards great music and old-time religion, but Gaines's love of Bach soars above dogmatism.Metro Girl, by Janet Evanovich HARPERCOLLINS £6.99 (393pp) With ten Stephanie Plum mysteries to her name, US crime writer Evanovich branches out with a new wise-cracking heroine, Alex Barnaby. Alex is a mechanic's daughter and, sadly for her female readership, a woman obsessed with cars and spare parts. Though the Plum books were nominally stories of intrigue, the characters were as least as interested in food and men as murder. In contrast, Alex swaps cute banter with the boys about dipsticks and stock racing. In Miami, she is on the trail of her lost brother, whose disappearance is linked with missing gold and even the Cuban missle crisis.Salonica: City of ghosts, by Mark Mazower HARPERPERENNIAL £8.99 (525pp) A splendid narrative history of the now-Greek port city that, for 500 years, embodied the multi-cultural Mediterranean at its hybrid, bustling best. Showing via a vivid patchwork of people and events how Muslims, Christians and Jews joined in the Ottoman centuries to build up their cultural and commercial powerhouse, Mazower exposes the "false continuities and convenient silences" of all nationalists. Pasha, priest or prostitute, Salonicans grew rich and famous on live-and-let-live.
Then the modern fevers of identity gripped them,
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and led to tragedy when, in 1943, 45,000 of the city's Jews perished in Auschwitz.Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, by Jorge Amado BLOOMSBURY £8.99 (448pp)Amado, who died at 88 in 2001, was the grand old man of Brazilian literature. This reprint of a 1958 classic has intrigue, assassinations and a high quota of fantastic events. Set in the mid-Twenties in the cocoa-growing town of Ilh?, the novel describes the impact on the males - and especially on Nacib the Arab bar-owner - of a beautiful mulatto girl. A tale of murder, miracles, food, revenge and well-dressed balconies.Forward Book of Poetry 2006 FORWARD £8.99 (147pp) A reliably rich catch from the Forward Prizes, with winning pieces by this year's victors (David Harsent, Paul Farley, Helen Farish) beside striking new works from the poetic A-list: Carol Ann Duffy and Paul Muldoon to Alice Oswald.It's a mouth-watering taster for poetry lovers, but also a toe-in-the-water treat for sceptics Forget polemics and savour the real deal. What the late Julia Darling writes of her beloved Newcastle goes for poetry as a whole: "Don't give it a mirror Let it be itself.". Pity the poor blurb-writer. What's one to say about about a book as obstinately resistant to summary as this? It's an unholy stew of literary and occult hearsay, harebrained surmise encompassing Beckett, Joyce, Burroughs, Alan Moore and Jon Pertwee as Worzel Gummidge; it's a picaresque road-movie in the form of a botched quest; and a dream-fugue on the subject of memory - memories that are lies, or masquerading as a skewed reality. It is also a sensitive, beautifully rendered portrait of the poet John Clare. But none of this can convey the full impact of the item itself. The essential conceit of Edge of the Orison is that Iain Sinclair pursues "the traces of the mad poet John Clare", while investigating his wife's claim to be Clare's distant relation.