Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, By Marina Waner Carry the One, By Carol Anshaw The New Granta Book of Travel, Edited by Liz Jobey It's Fine By Me, By Per Petterson Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World, By Jeremy Harding Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian, By Marina Warner Vintage £18.99 "The public are Orientalising," Lord Byron once wrote, of the public clamour for magic tales from the East. What has been their appeal for us? With her characteristic mix of depth and breadth, Marina Warner's superb study seeks to rescue "magic" from its place of exile outside of rationality and show that imagination can hold as much reason as empirical thought. Fantastic narratives "give meaning to ways of irrational thinking," she argues, and so takes as her focal point a book where the lead narrator is a woman, Shahrazad, who, by her words - by reason within fantastical tales - manages to change what a powerful man thinks and does. The power of fantasy lies partly in its narrative conventions, such as the flying carpet ("a kind of portable sanctum"), partly in its stereotyped characters (the vengeful wife), but Warner also shows how subversive these stories can be. Seen as a kind of counterpoint to the Koran, in that it is probably the best-known of the Eastern texts in the West, the Arabian Nights is not revered as a sacred volume, but has been considered an almost disposable one, full of tales meant for children. Yet its links to the Bible, to Voltaire, to Proust, to Catcher in the Rye, even to Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from my Father, give it a far-reaching legacy in Western culture. These were tales told by a mercantile culture, where objects had serious monetary value and reflected the position of a woman bargaining for her life. Carry the One, By Carol Anshaw Penguin £7.99 Despite often beautiful prose, the three central characters of Anshaw's family romance struggle through much of this novel to make a serious impact. On the night that Carmen gets married, her artist sister Alice, entwined with new love Maude in the back of a car, and her doped-up brother Nick, high with his girlfriend Olivia, run over and kill a young girl. As the driver of the car, Olivia suffers the most obvious consequences of that event - she serves a prison sentence - but it also affects the sisters in more subtle ways. These are possibly a little too subtle: it's hard to see what changes about Carmen or Alice, and at times they both seem insipid and too interchangeable, despite different interests and different lives. The New Granta Book of Travel, Edited by Liz Jobey Granta £12.99 Is the travel narrative essentially a conservative one? Not formally experimental, often nostalgic and even sentimental, its lack of innovation and daring (except, perhaps, in the locations a writer visits) mean it is rarely regarded as a superior art form. This "new" collection (some pieces have been published before) doesn't necessarily challenge that essential conservatism, but it does showcase what is much loved about travel writing. Thomas Keneally's superb "Captain Scott's Biscuit" follows the author on a second trip to Antarctica where he attempts to return the "purloined" biscuit he took from the site of Scott's encampment; Andrew O'Hagan's trip along the Clyde on a slurry, or sludge, boat; Lavinia Greenlaw's experience of light and dark in "Arctic" - all capture that sense of the shock of the familiar within the unfamiliar. It's Fine By Me, By Per Petterson Vintage £7.99 Petterson's pared-back prose is a perfect match for his alienated and traumatised teenage hero, Audun, whose drunken father has all but destroyed his fractured family and whose younger brother has been killed in a car crash. Not only does Petterson marry perfectly the form and the content in this way, the broody teenage boy speaking in clipped sentences just as the author writes them, but the landscape of the part of Oslo where he lives, always on the borders, never quite fitting in, mirrors the style and the content, too. Sympathy for Audun lies in his aspirations to be a writer and his intentions to do what is best, even though these intentions often go awry. It may be a cliché of coming-of-age stories that they must reflect the darkness of growing up, but Petterson gives it a freshness and vitality nevertheless. Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World, By Jeremy Harding Verso £9.99 Harding's subject matter is a serious one that demands explanation of political decisions and a breaking-down of statistics, both of which make for a challenging and often depressing read. The testimonies of individual migrants here add up to a plea for some compassion for those who make the difficult journey, often alone and in danger, to a strange new place - but they are unlikely to get it. Historically, as Harding shows, European countries have gone through periods of welcoming then rejecting incomers and America is, of course, the country of immigrants. But future climate refugees will soon challenge notions of borders, and what constitutes "welcome."