RESULTS

In the race to be first in describing the lost generation of the eighties, Geoff Dyer in The Colour of Memory leads past the winning post. 'We're not lost' one of his hero's friend's says, 'we're virtually extinct'. It is a small world in Brixton that Dyer commemorates, of council flats and instant wasteland, of living on the dole and the scrounge, of mugging, which is merely begging by force, and of litening to Callas and Coltrane. It is the nostalgia of the DHSS Bohemians, the children of unsocial security, in an urban landscape of debris and wreckage. Not since Colin MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners thirty years ago has a novel stuck a flick-knife so accurately into the young and marginal city. A low- keyed style and laconic wit touch up The Colour of Memory' The Times.

The Ongoing Moment is an idiosyncratic history of photography. Seeking to identify their signature styles Dyer looks at the ways that canonical figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Walker Evans, Kert sz, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus and William Eggleston have photographed the same things (benches, hats, hands, roads). In doing so he constructs a narrative in which the same photographers - many of whom never met in their lives - constantly come into contact with each other. Great photographs change the way we see the world; The Ongoing Moment changes the way we look at both. It is the most ambitious example to date of a form of writing that Dyer has made his own - the non-fiction work of art.

'People talk about love at first sight, about the way that men and women fall for each other immediately, but there is also such a thing as friendship at first sight .' In Paris, two couples form an intimacy that will change their lives forever. As they discover the clubs and cafes of the eleventh arrondissement, the four become inseparable, united by deeply held convictions about dating strategies, tunnelling in P.O.W. films and, crucially, the role of the Styrofoam cup in American thrillers. Experiencing the exhilarating highs of Ecstasy and sex, they reach a peak of rapture - the come-down from which is unexpected and devastating. In his latest novel Dyer fixes a dream of happiness - and its aftermath - with photographic precision. Erotic and elegaic, funny and romantic, Paris Trance confirms Dyer as one of Britain's most original and talented writers.

This isn't Geoff Dyer's self-help book. Rather it is a book about how the author himself could do with a little help. In funny and thought-provoking prose, he describes a life most of us would love to live - and how much that life frustrates and aggravates him. From Amsterdam to Cambodia, from Rome to Indonesia, from New Orleans to Libya, from Detroit to Ko Pha-Ngan, Dyer finds himself floundering in a sea of grievances and loses himself in moments of transcendental calm.