Neil Young's motormouth

If you read one book this week

The Peripheral, by William Gibson (Viking) R275

It is some time in the late 21st century, a future world where the technology that today is considered to be in its infancy is advanced and commonplace. A young American woman, Flynne Fisher, witnesses a bizarre murder while testing an advanced computer game. Suddenly she finds her world being manipulated by a wealthy political elite that dwells 70 years in her future. The big cheese of speculation fiction, this is Gibson's most imaginative work since Idoru, a frantically paced page-turner.

The issue

There's not much rock 'n' roll in Neil Young's new book, Special Deluxe:A Memoir of Life and Cars (Viking). For that you'd need to stick with his first, last year's Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream. But this one is no less quirky and it's wonderfully candid. Be warned, though, it's not really for petrolheads. His yard may be cluttered with Chryslers, Lincolns, Buicks, Packards and Plymouths - those wonderful symbols of the American dream - but his heart is filled with regret at the mayhem they've caused in the environment. Those days of rolling stoned through the country back roads, high on good weed are, alas, over for him.

Crash course

Britain's Biteback Publishing recently launched Provocations, a series of polemics that, judging by their titles, will probably do exactly what it says on the box: The Madness of Modern Parenting, What Have The Immigrants Ever Done For Us?, Down With The Royals, Why Women Need Quotas and so on.

I read an extract from one of them at the weekend - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's Refusing the Veil - and can report that the book is unlikely to find fans among the "male theologians, chauvinist leaders and fake fakirs" who, she feels, have sullied Islam. I was happily reminded what fun there was to be had in apostasy and challenging orthodoxy.

A Shia Muslim, born and raised in Uganda and who now works in the UK as a columnist and broadcaster, Alibhai-Brown leaves little to the imagination in describing the indoctrinated lives of young niqab-shrouded women: "The world bursts with colour, but many of them will be dull shadows on the landscape and most will never let the wind blow through their hair. Of course, they still laugh and play and love life - but in a severely restricted environment. They will be incessantly watched. Saddest of all, they will not know how small their world is."

The bottom line

"When I confronted Jack [Nicholson] on the phone, distraught, sad, mad, he said: 'Oh, Toots, it was just a mercy f***.' That was the first time I'd heard copulation described as an act of compassion - not that he'd vowed to be faithful to me, but he thought it was an acceptable answer." - Watch Me: A Memoir by Anjelica Huston (Simon & Schuster)