Rifling Paradise Jem Poster (Sceptre, £7.99) Victorian landowner Charles Redbourne, a closet gay, is under a cloud after being implicated in the suicide of one of his workers. Remembering his youthful hobby of natural science, he mounts an expedition to Australia, where he stays with Edward Vane and finds himself drawn to his host's strange daughter, Eleanor. In search of scientific specimens in the Blue Mountains, guided by a half-aboriginal boy, a drama ensues which changes Redbourne's life. The second novel by Poster, a former creative writing tutor with Oxford University's Department of Continuing Education, Rifling Paradise is an evocative, beautifully written story which stays in the memory for a long time.

A Good School Richard Yates (Methuen, £7.99) A re-issue of Yates's story of awkward adolescent William Grove, shipped off to a not-so-prestigious New England boarding school on the verge of financial disaster, where he joins a cast of all-American outcasts. With no encouragement from the school or from his divorced parents, William begins to mature and comes to terms with his lot by throwing himself into the school newspaperr. Behind all this is the disturbing backdrop of the looming Second World War.

Our Inner Ape Frans De Waal (Granta, £9.99) oMan's violent, aggressive, competitive nature has often been blamed on his animal ancestry. De Waal looks at the other side of the coin - the way we are driven to co-operation, empathy, and morality. He compares the most provocative aspects of human nature - power, sex, violence, kindness, and morality - to what happens in the family life of our two closest cousins in the ape family.