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Dear Zari

By Zarghuna Kargar Vintage, £8.99.

Zarghuna Kargar produced and presented the BBC World Service's Afghan Women's Hour from 2004 to 2010: this book is a selection of some of the true stories of women's lives in Taliban Afghanistan. They are stories to make your blood boil with indignation: Women beaten and abused by brutal husbands and poisonous in-laws, persecuted because they didn't bleed on their wedding night, given away to pay debts, forced into marriage from the age of 11, denied legal rights, shut up in dark rooms and forced to weave carpets, imprisoned behind burqas.

One woman is disowned by her husband because she loses a leg in a rocket attack. It is a sick, misogynistic society in which the toxic cult of shame means men will murder daughters and sisters rather than bear the disapproval of neighbours. The only bright spot is the courage and stoicism of the women; but there are not many happy endings.

The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness

By Lila Azam Zanganeh Penguin, £9.99.

This is one of those books that at first looks thoroughly self-indulgent to the point of meaninglessness (who cares what a debut writer has to say about her literary worship of Nabokov?) but whose intellectual playfulness and delicate emotionalism has something lovely to say about words and stories and how they can transform the world.

Zanganeh, an exile like Nabokov himself, but from her parents' homeland of Iran, delights in imagining interviews with the author, and she selects comments from him that reflect a writer's self-consciousness when using another language, and sympathises with his dreams of Russia, a country he can never go back to. It's a mixture of both economy and voluptuousness.

The Magic of Reality

By Richard Dawkins Black Swan, £8.99.

This book might have been intended for younger readers, but some adults could benefit from Dawkins's straightforward explanations of various phenomena (the Sun, rainbows, earthquakes) and simple accounts of natural selection and DNA, too.

His premise is that the real magic, the magic of science (as opposed to the magic of myth or religion), is the most fascinating kind, and he works hard to prove it, anticipating questions and easing worries, with enough nods to the great masters, Darwin and Newton, to give readers a sense of history, too.

Few could bring together so many different aspects of science and culture and distil them into something quite so readable and appealing.

The Declining Significance of Homophobia

By Mark McCormack Oxford, £32.50

Back in 1994, the "metrosexual" was born in the pages of this newspaper, in an essay which predicted that the future of men belonged to him and his vain, "gay" ways. Now sociologists have finally noticed him, and the impact he has had on masculinity. For this book researcher Mark McCormack regularly visited three schools, and the 16-18-year-old boys he discovered there were "fashion conscious, wearing tight low-slung jeans and designer underwear`85 they used moisturiser and even tanning products."

"These boys hugged each other hello and goodbye, sat on each other's laps, and gave their friends back rubs. Back when I was a student in school, similar behaviours would have coded boys as gay, and they would have been bullied for it. Yet at these schools, these behaviours made them some of the most popular with students. What was going on?"

What indeed? School is often held up as a place where homophobia rules but, in encouraging contrast to the propaganda of gay-rights group Stonewall, his research found no overt homophobia in secondary schools. Instead, heterosexual students seem to be proud of their pro-gay attitudes. Homophobia, not homosexuality, is now frowned upon.

McCormack doesn't explain why homophobia has declined so in schools, but argues that the result is an expansion of behaviours available to young men – given that fear of being labelled gay was the main way boys' gender conformity was policed. Once that fear falls away, the floodgates of affection and affectation open. The real value of this book isn't the way it rescues gay teens from victimhood, but in the revolution in masculinity it documents, about which many oldies are still in denial. The stereotype of young hetero men as homophobic and emotionally illiterate can't really survive hearing about straight boys who sit on each other's laps talking about skin products and calling one another, not very ironically, "lover", "babes" and "boyfriend". — The Independent

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