Want to survive the apocalypse? Get a taste for pet food

If you read one book this week

'Six Years' by Harlan Coben (Orion) R170

An extraordinary page-turner, this. College professor Jake Fisher has his heart broken when his girlfriend, Natalie, suddenly leaves him and marries another man. Six years later, Fisher reads an obituary notice for Natalie's husband and sneaks along to the funeral - where he is stunned to discover the grieving widow is not Natalie. And so begins an edge-of-your-seat ride as Fisher hunts for the truth.

The issue

Crime novelist Val McDermid's reworking of Jane Austen's least-popular book, Northanger Abbey, is out. Commissioned by HarperCollins to reimagine Austen for a modern audience, McDermid clearly has fun modernising Austen's heroine, 17-year-old Catherine Morland - here she is Cat, an adolescent vampire obsessive hooked on Twitter and Facebook and glued to her mobile phone - and has brought an edge of fear to what was a gently satirical novel. Joanna Trollope's Sense and Sensibility and Curtis Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice are due shortly.

Crash course

Two books full of handy tips: one on how to survive an apocalypse and the other, perhaps more daunting, what to do if your home is a dump (which it no doubt is.)

Let's hope we don't get there in our lifetime, but Lewis Dartnell's The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (Bodley Head) is a breezy guide on rebuilding civilisation once, let's just say, a global viral pandemic wipes out all but 10000 or so people on the planet. Before the cities collapse and burn (as they will), survivors must loot, loot, and loot. Supermarkets first.

A researcher with the UK Space Agency, Dartnell reckons a supermarket could keep one person alive for 55 years - or 63, even, if you eat the canned pet food. Then comes the hard bit, rebuilding agriculture, making fuel from wood, dealing with sewage. All Boy Scout stuff.

Columnist Jolie Kerr's slightly bossy but unfussy house-cleaning manual (aimed at those setting up home for the first time), My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag . . . And Other Things You Can't Ask Martha (Plume) is probably the more practical book. It covers the usual territory - cleaning ovens, care of linens, saving scorched pots - and breaks new ground with eye-popping candour. Non-motorised sex toys, for example, can safely be popped into the dishwasher. Also, how to deal with bong water spilt on carpets, lube smears on sheets, urine stains on the ceiling (don't ask) and the ubiquitous vomit, which, as it turns out, is everywhere. Five will get you 10 that some smart aleck is already rewriting this for the local market.

The bottom line

"Sometimes it seems many conservationists would prefer a species to go extinct than to survive somewhere it doesn't 'belong'." - Where Do Camels Belong? The Story and Science of Invasive Species by Ken Thompson (Profile)