Marrying Anita: A Quest for Love in the New India By Anita Jain, Bloomsbury, £7.99stg

The pressure on Anita Jain to find a husband started very early: aged one, when she fell out of a building in Baltimore and broke her arm, her mother's gravest concern was her marriageability. Jain's arm recovered, but it is her broken heart, which takes longer to heal, that is the focus of this humorous memoir, in which she details her search for a suitable husband.

A few months before turning 33, in a reversal of her father's migration, she moves to India. It is 2005, and India's finances, film and fashion industry appear to be booming.

But alas, the author's love life still lags behind. The best bits of this book are Jain's colourful descriptions of her potential suitors, from Vijay, a band manager with long kinky hair, to Shekhar, a man who laughs easily and seems to hang on to her every word – but not her heart.

Although it unfortunately occasionally slips into cliché, Jain's evocation of the "complicated, perplexing and ego-deflating" process of dating in New York and Delhi is mostly entertaining, informative and tinged with pathos. As she tries to fix her values in a world ever in flux, she searches not only for a husband but also a home.

Fieldwork By Mischa Berlinski, Atlantic, £7.99stg

in THE opening page of Berlinski's novel, a character is sketched in with such ease that it is hard to believe that this is a debut: Josh O'Connor won a week in Thailand in a lottery in a bar, loved the place and never left. Showtime, folks. The rest of the story is told with a wry, clipped humour. Josh is asked to visit a women's prison to meet and pass on some information to a murderess who has taken out a religious missionary, a 24-carat zealot, with a shotgun. She is a blue-eyed Thai called Martiya – her father was Dutch. During her time in jail, she has written two books on anthropology, spent years with the Dyalo tribe, whose members include Bad Skin, and Sings-Too-Loud, and Farts-A-Lot. I think she took out the missionary because he was destroying the social cohesiveness of the hill tribe. But I was laughing so much I may have missed the real reason.

Hello Sailor By Michael Hutchinson, Yellow Jersey, £12.99stg

Choosing a wink-wink, nudge-nudge title puts an author under pressure to deliver the laughs, but Michael Hutchinson rises to the occasion with ease in his tale of a chequered life before the mast.

He spent his childhood in Northern Ireland addictively messing about in boats before choosing a career in academia but he gave it up to become a professional cyclist. His excellent previous book, The Hour, chronicled with humour his attempt at one of cycling's most historic records, and this account of his return to his first love after 15 years is up to his very demanding scratch.

Crewing for anybody who'd have him, he raced around Britain and Europe for a year and he makes his exploits amusing, while making some pertinent points about the curious social structure yachting folk espouse.

Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons By Matthew Fort, Ebury, £8.99stg

In 1973, Fort ate a plate of sausages in Sicily. There were only two, but "they tasted more of sausage than any sausage I have ever eaten: firm, juicy, salty and sweet".

Then, 33 years later, he continued his southern snack by touring the island on a scooter. The result is the finest book on this fascinating cuisine since Peter Robb's Midnight in Sicily. From pasta ("redder than a cardinal's hat, redder than poppies") to pudding (the creamy confection known as cannolo is "a tsunami of sweetness, sweetness piled on sweetness... hallucinatory, luxurious and heady)", Fort fills your mind with delicious images and your mouth with saliva. Obligatory holiday reading for anyone heading to Sicily, this book's only flaw is the lack of an index. The omission is particularly annoying since Fort punctuates his book with recipes.

The Pursuit of Laughter By Diana Mosley, Gibson Square, £8.99stg

"Clever, good company, always ready with a sarcastic witticism."

The life and soul of the party being described is Dr Joseph Goebbels. Equally startling is Diana's suggestion that her Fascist husband Oswald should have been offered war work in 1940 instead of going to jail: "If traditional English values had prevailed instead of those of a banana republic, then Kit [her nickname for Mosley] would have accepted work offered him."

Some may be enraged by the blasé opinions in this scrapbook of reviews, articles and diary snippets, but the overall impression is one of blinkered aristocratic hauteur rather than malignity.

Additional reviews by The Independent