Cross Channel, by Julian Barnes (Picador, £5.99 in UK)

"This book is a delight...", "... billowing lightness of imagination ..." - so go the reviews quoted on the back cover. Nominally it consists of 10 stories, all with French themes or settings or general ambience, but in effect these are little more than sketches or impressionistic miniatures touched off with an airy intellectual gamesmanship. Julian Barnes wrote one interesting short novel, Flauhert's Parrot, and at the moment, apparently, he can do nothing wrong in the eyes of the critics - or of the public either, since this book has been a bestseller. Personally I found it disappointingly slight and with a rather gratingly self satisfied tone, but then perhaps the author intended it as a stylish souffle and nothing more.