Book reviews: Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith | The Empty Family by Colm Toibin | Fab by Howard Sounes

Our critic takes a look at the best and worst of recently published paperbacks...

CHANGING MY MIND ****

BY ZADIE SMITH

Penguin, 9.99

A BOOK of essays, some of the best I've read for ages. Zadie Smith writes with clarity and depth. Almost everything she says here is of interest. She's brilliant on: race, the meanings of words, EM Forster, Kafka, Clare Danes's face, lots of movies and the novel. She is very sharp on the exact type of mood we want from our novels, and why this should be. An observational essay on the Oscars, in which she omits famous names, is quite dazzling. She writes about her own writing, too; upon finishing one novel, she says, she lay down in her garden and cried.

THE EMPTY FAMILY ****

BY COLM TOIBN

Penguin, 9.99

COLM Toibin is good on the details of sadness. In these stories, we see inside people's empty lives. They are piercing. In one, a man living in Texas remembers the death of his mother six years earlier, when he was living in New York. The mother died in Ireland. The details concern flights, phone calls, the rituals of death. People fail to communicate, in a way that is finely calibrated. In another story, a woman arrives in Ireland; she is reminded of a man she loved, now dead. In a third, an Irishwoman meets Henry James at a dinner party. She wants to tell him something, but can't, quite.

FAB ***

by Howard Sounes

HarperCollins, 9.99

DID I want to read yet another probe into the lives of The Beatles, telling us how unfabulous their lives actually were? Howard Sounes concentrates on Paul McCartney. It's pretty good; there's a detailed section on his recent divorce, and a passage about his first wife Linda's death which moved me. Sounes provides lots of factual detail. In the end, McCartney remains essentially mysterious – which is all to the good.

If they've changed Wonder Woman's costume, character and cast, then Diana isn't getting the attention she deserved. Someone else is getting her name.

DC could start a Vertigo version with 'Wonder Woman' topless, and that'd get her talked about and sell copies. But it wouldn't be Diana.

I'm fine with tweaks, new directions and the like, but when a character becomes, at core, someone different, yeah, I'll be unhappy.