Whether or not this book ends up convincing the reader that contemplating beauty is more than just a distraction from more serious matters, the writing is always well-organised and sincere.Some may find the sincerity a little hard to handle Scarry opines: “Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside.” She confesses that, one winter, “when I was bereft because my garden was underground”, she smothered the walls of her “austere” house with colour prints of his work: 13 in a single room. She became so accustomed to Matisse’s palm fronds “or, to be precise… a perfect cross between an anemone flower and a palm frond” that she found her former disregard of palm trees “startling”.Focusing solely on the occasionally precious excesses of Scarry’s personal insights is, however, unfair. Her argument marshals the work of such diverse individuals as Plato, Proust and Simone Weil.

Whether you love the message or loathe it, her ruminations open up the text, making it as engaging as it is accessible.No Fireworks by Rodge Glass (FABER £7.99) When Abe Stone’s mother, Evelyn, dies, the 61-year-old alcoholic finds she has left instructions for him to arrange a conventional Jewish funeral. It comes as a surprise – like him, his mother hadn’t been near a synagogue for years. Thinking the worst of her apparently very late change of heart and already deflated by the revelation that her will does nothing to ease his debts, he proceeds anyway, unaware that the week ahead will only become more confusing. Getting the caterers to provide sandwiches at the wake, forgetting it’s the first day of Passover when Jews aren’t supposed to eat bread, is nothing compared to what follows.His son’s wife departs on an indefinite holiday (she spent years caring for Evelyn and dealing with her husband Nathan’s financial problems); Nathan’s daughter, Lucille, gets expelled from school for knifing a boy; and letters from Evelyn start to turn up. The first, entitled “Know Thyself”, tells him: “I brought you up to believe in nothing, but it has made you less of a man…

If you give me a chance I will show you it’s still possible to rescue your life from the gutter.” Together with Lucille, Abe sets out to try and discover precisely what his mother’s message is, and how he can resurrect his life.Glass is a very good comic writer, but there’s an underlying seriousness to this book, a careful examination of race and religion, that makes it feel very solid indeed. There are a few faults in the text, chiefly some pointless adverbs; but why blame a first-time author for his editor’s lack of rigour?Curry: a tale of cooks and conquerers by Lizzie Collingham (VINTAGE £8.99) Food historians and cooks alike should find this book an absolute joy. Collingham’s bid to tell the history of India and its rulers through the story of curry contains an extraordinary degree of detail and some very fine recipes.She addresses a couple of recent controversies: firstly, the chicken tikka masala furore of 2001, when Robin Cook hailed it as the new national dish of Great Britain; and secondly the revelation that “Indian” served in old-style British curry houses is generally cooked by Bangladeshis. In the case of chicken tikka masala, derided as a British invention by “sneering” food writers, she suggests that authenticity might not be “the right yardstick by which to judge an Indian meal”. When it comes to the question of Bangladeshi chefs, food on the subcontinent does not divide into different culinary styles and dishes along relatively new national boundaries. “The food of Bangladesh belongs to the culinary world of Bengal.

Punjabis share a food culture, although their region was split in two with the creation of Pakistan.”It only takes a look at some of India’s earliest history to see why discussions of “authentic” Indian food might be fraught. Babur, the first Mughal to rule India, came from what is today Uzbekistan and a culture that prized hunting and meat eating as vital to masculinity. A clash occurred when he conquered Hindustan, where the cow was a sacred animal and vegetarianism was a mark of high social status. The resulting fusion of food cultures resulted in the cuisine that, for many people outside India, “is synonymous with Indian food”.On Beauty by Zadie Smith (PENGUIN £7.99) Smith’s third novel is an openly declared homage to E M Forster – almost, it would seem, a lovingly redrafted version of Howard’s End. That isn’t to say that this book, a chronicle of the rift between two feuding families, is unoriginal (much here has nothing whatsoever to do with Forster; at various points she even quotes passages of her husband Nick Laird’s poetry), but it does feel overwhelmingly soulless.The Belseys live in Wellington, a university town just outside Boston, New England. The father, Howard, is a cynical white academic who’s recently had an affair. His wife, Kiki, is a large, loud black woman who long ago left behind the world of radical politics for a sensible job and to take on the responsibilities of motherhood.