If you're into cracker crime. Where All Light Tends To Go by David Joy (Putnam) R315A painful yet beautifully crafted coming-of-age novel, Joy's debut should please fans of Cormac McCarthy and the country noir of Daniel Woodrell (Winter's Bone).Jacob is an 18-year-old youth press-ganged into his father's backwoods crystal meth operation. It's a violent, hard business - but Jacob has his mind on other matters: his high-school sweetheart is graduating and she is not going to be hanging around their depressed North Carolina home town too long. The two forces - love and drug-running - are locked in a compelling, yet vicious, embrace throughout.The issueThere's a big transatlantic noise about San Francisco journalist Robin Rinaldi's memoir, The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost (Hodder & Stoughton), and it probably won't be long before it flies off local book store shelves at a Fifty Shades clip.The gist of it is this: Rinaldi made a deal with her husband, Scott, to take a year off their stable but sexually unsatisfying 18-year marriage to sleep with other people. This was essentially because he had insisted on a vasectomy when she was 43 and longing for a baby. After some soul-searching, she decided she could only live with not being a mother if she was free to sleep around (there's a traumatic childhood in there somewhere; Rinaldi's father, we learn, was a violent, abusive alcoholic).Rinaldi took 12 lovers in her year off - each of whom, according to the deal she made, she could only see three times. They included a vegan poet and a couple of women. No detail is spared. There's plenty on the shapes and sizes of penises and sexual techniques of all concerned. Plus some esoterica on orgasmic meditation. This is California, after all.Scott, meanwhile, also slept around. But he broke the rules by seeing just one woman for six months and not using condoms. Then Rinaldi broke the rules by falling in love with one of her paramours. Unsurprisingly, the marriage ends in a messy divorce. Again, no detail is spared.While critics have said Rinaldi's "project" was an ill-advised one, they do suggest that her book is important because of its unashamed focus on the quest for female sexual fulfilment. "It is a testament to how far feminism has taken us all that a woman can not only undertake such an adventure," Eleanor Mills wrote in the London Sunday Times, "but write about it so brazenly. And in a porn-saturated world where, too often, the lens through which we see sex is masculine, her unapologetic account of her search for sexual nirvana is hugely refreshing."The bottom line"[He] thought everyone was doing something physical and nasty behind every closed door - except himself." - Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus)..