Take a walk on the wild side

The suicide kit (Vintage, £ 3.95) by David L. Hayles is a collection of little black tales or vignettes of life on the wild side. These are stories of the suffering, the delusional and the criminally insane. It explores a world where death comes unexpectedly and violently, at the hands of psychopaths and riflemen, freaks, housewives or deluded travellers. Hayle mixes menace, cruelty and hilarity to create a grimly comic, but ultimately slight, body of writing. “The rope noose, the car exhaust, a shotgun in the mouth, the oven, pills, razor blades, the leap, the tube train, the speeding truck, the railway tracks, the river, canal or pond, an electrical appliance in the bath, two pencils in the nostrils at exam time, ether, strychnine, rat poison, toxic gas? Forget about it!”

A woman madly in love (Roli, Rs 350) by Boman Desai is a heady novel about a spiritedly brittle sub-continental femme fatale, Farida Cooper. Farida — rich, voluptuous, damaged and damaging — is a combination of an Evelyn Waugh heroine and one of Khushwant Singh’s Hundred Favourite Women. She would have greatly benefited from a literary editor of comparable heartlessness. Desai’s book ranges from Bombay to Chicago, from World War II to the Eighties, and has one of Amrita Sher-Gil’s most wanton self-portraits on the cover.

Che guevara reader (LeftWord, Rs 450) edited by David Deutschmann is is the second, expanded edition of his selected writings on politics and revolution. Prepared in association with the Che Guevara Studies Centre of Havana, this selection of speeches, writings and letters proves Guevara to be considerably more than a guerrilla strategist. His profound and lasting contribution to revolutionary theory is organized into four sections: the Cuban war (1956-58), the years in government in Cuba (1959-65), the vision of the Latin American revolution and the letters, especially his farewell letters to Fidel Castro and his children and family. There are annotations, a bibliography, a chronology and a glossary of names and organizations.

Moon island (Arrow, £ 3.95) by Rosie Thomas is a kitschy women’s-magazine fiction of the soulful kind. “Love and sex, loss and disappointment burn their way relentlessly through this intense and involving novel,” writes Ideal Home. Thomas’s other novels are called Follies, Bad Girls, Good Women, All My Sins Remembered, Every Woman Knows a Secret and If My Father Loved Me. There are many more.