Andre Gide: a Life in the Present by Alan Sheridan (Penguin, £14.99 in UK)

As recently as 20 years ago, Gide still counted among the leading European writers of the mid-century, but since then his reputation has gone downhill on skids. Is this long, exhaustive biography a sign of reawakening interest in both the man and his work? Though his fiction has not stood up well, Gide was a consummate man of letters and a central cultural figure in his time, whose infatuation with Communism and later repudiation of it stirred up waves of controversy - as did his expose of French colonialism. Alan Sheridan portrays a man torn between loyalty to his wife (a cousin) and his innate homosexuality; Gide was also a French Protestant, a rather special breed. Even those who care little for his books will find plenty of interest in the depiction of intellectual France over several decades.