Paws for thought in dog's tale

Every dog owner at least once on the daily long walk ponders what his pet thinks of the world as mankind has made it.

It's a question that we'll never be able to answer, because the dog is the ultimate in adaptability and responds positively no matter what the surroundings, so long as he's cared for.

Aster, though, seeks to analyse life from one dog's point of view, and the result is an extraordinary story as he steps outside the human species to allow us to see ourselves through the eyes of the loving creatures that share our lives.

Aster's first work of fiction in five years is an engaging tale, by turns comic and poignant, written with great energy.

His canine central character, Mr Bones, who somehow just knows that when humans die they go to somewhere called Timbuktu, is the sidekick of the writing hobo, Willy G Christmas.

Sheer writing prowess forces us to see our world as perhaps our dogs see it.

, and should give pause for thought.

THIS IS THE BEAT GENERATION, by James Campbell, Secker & Warburg, hardback £16.99.

A highly entertaining and original account of the beatnik era from Glasgow-born author and playwright James Campbell.

Beginning in New York as early as 1944, Campbell finds the leading members of what was to become the Beat Generation in the shadows of madness and criminality.

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs had all seen the inside of mental hospitals and prisons by the age of 30. A few months after they met another member of their circle committed a murder which involved Kerouac and Burroughs as material witnesses.

Campbell charts the transformation of these experiences into a literary movement that spread across the globe. From the 1944 murder we end in Paris in 1960 with Burroughs in the Beat Hotel.

In between we discover San Francisco, where Ginsberg gave the first reading of Howl; Burroughs in Mexico City and Tangiers; the French background to the Beats; the tortuous history of the cult classic On The Road and the black ancestry of the white hipster.

NEAR NEIGHBOURS, by Gordon Legge, Vintage, paperback £6.99.

If Legge's stories are new to you, then be prepared for a voyage into weirdness, where the bounds of imagination are stretched to well beyond the limit of what is accepted as normal human experience, where the familiar becomes the - mercifully - unfamiliar and where only language is recognisable.

His second collection of short stories introduces an eccentric world similar to our own, peopled by characters who live for football, music and sex but who are also monopedes, cross-gender doppelgangers, window-fetishists or sock-throwers.

Grangemouth-born Legge is a master of broad farce and the paranoid monologue, applied cleverly as he looks obliquely at life and returns it to us with all its grim hilarity, sadness - but also with its humanity restored.

He has written two novels, and his first short story collection was hailed by the New York Times as "a cult classic". Near Neighbours ranks him with Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Duncan McLean as one of the most exciting and original of the new Scots writers.

FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN, by Tim Glover and Peter Higgs, Mainstream, hardback £15.99.

A unique round-up by two award-winning sports writers of the greatest nail-biting finishes in the history of golf's major championships, the Open, the Masters, the US Open and the US PGA.

In golf, nowhere is the mental strain more apparent than at the closing stages of a major championship. The crowd, absorbed in every shot, conveys the tension to the players, who are also involved in another contest - the mind game.

Before missing the most notorious putt in the history of the Open, Doug Sanders was already thinking of which side of the gallery he would turn to first to acknowledge the applause.

When he missed a three-foot putt that would have won him the silver, there was no applause. Instead, people reacted is of they had just witnessed a terrible accident.

When Nick Faldo won the Open at Muirfield in 1992, he broke down in tears. It had felt like 15 heavyweight rounds rather than 18 holes of golf, and the gut-wrenching intensity had reduced the ice man to meltdown.

"I went to the edge of seeing what real failure was," he said. "If it had gone wrong it would have been a tough one to live with. I've been lucky in avoiding the major scars in this game."

Others are marked for life. John Cook, who missed a putt at the 17th even shorter than Sanders', said years later of That Putt: "It doesn't bother me. Sometimes I go five minutes without it crossing my mind."

Some game.

A HARLOT'S PROGRESS, by David Dabydeen, Jonathan Cape, paperback £9.99.

In a powerful exploration of the immigrant experience, respected Caribbean novelist David Dabydeen reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732, which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed.

The novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, seeing beyond their predicament and redeeming them from their cliched status as predators or victims.

The protagonist - in Hogarth a black slave boy, in Dabydeen London's oldest inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity.

But he will not embark in yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader; instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots, as deftly as a harlot her client, spinning a tale of myths and fantasies, a restlessly inventive mind recreating Africa and 18th century London in startlingly poetic ways.

In his fourth novel, Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world.

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