This book – in which Leo Hickman gets “ethically audited” by three experts and tries to follow their advice for the year – actually seems unique in that there are not a clutch of banal jokes on every page, and not everyone the author meets is a hilarious nutter. These excellent stories share an edginess that’s quite distinct from the quirkiness many contemporary English writers prefer to celebrate.A Life Stripped Bare, by Leo Hickman (EDEN/GUARDIAN £7.99) How grim it is when a journalist decides to do something unusual for a day/week/year and then write about it Well, usually, anyway. When her husband complains that he is not able to protect them, she rounds on him: “Did it ever occur to you that in my whole life I’ve never been able to take care of matters and make decisions about things that are important?” The editor’s own offering, “Transit”, tells how a young autistic girl speaks for the first time in 14 years and persuades a drunken hellraiser to help her steal some dolphins. At night she runs with wolves, by day she plays the part of a devoted wife. It’s an eerie tale with an unexpected ending.
Tove Jansson is best known for her Moomintroll stories, but her piece here is definitely for adults. Following an unspecified disaster, a wife “shops” for her injured husband by climbing through shattered windows and looking for food among the wreckage inside.

Aalo, a woodsman’s wife, hears someone call to her while she is watching a wolf hunt. Later, she can’t resist an urge to join the wolves in the forest and becomes a werewolf. “Wolf Bride”, by Aino Kallas, is set in the mid-17th century. As Sinisalo explains, Finland is a sparsely populated country with enough room for its citizens to form close ties with nature; and, throughout its history, the country has been torn between the empires of Sweden and Russia, both of which took their turn to dictate the language in which fiction was written. The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, ed Johanna Sinisalo (SERPENT’S TAIL £7.99)

These stories have two common denominators: nature and war. The fruit’s story turns out to be a gripping tale of sex, (imperial) violence and anxieties about status It is hard to imagine it better told.. An advertisement from the 1930s promises that a wife could make her man “smack his lips in real he-man enjoyment” – by baking him a pineapple pie.

It is a pity she tells us almost nothing about what the fruit means to her, but she makes very clear how its history has reflected changing attitudes to women. In 1702, a monk linked the pineapple with the Virgin Mary through a ridiculous interpretation of the Caribbean word ananas. Charles Lamb in 1821 warned that the fruit, “too ravishing for mortal taste”, “woundeth and excoriateth the lips that approach – like lovers’ kisses she biteth”. And even in the 1920s a society hostess declared that a really grand dinner required the presence of both a pineapple and Lady Curzon.Beauman, according to the publisher’s website, has a pineapple tattoo. Yet it is stuffed with astonishing, tirelessly researched and skilfully presented information about everything from the design of pineries to Victorian costermongers, from early gardening weeklies to the marketing of Hawaii.Beauman’s claims about the pineapple’s significance are well illustrated. The fruit was a key symbol of the privileges of the upper classes for late-18th-century radicals and for Russian revolutionaries “Pineapple heat” became a standard marking on thermometers. Each cost about the price of a new coach and demanded three years of “incredibly hard work for some unfortunate garden boy – stoking the stoves, raking the manure, even sleeping among the plants to make sure they did not burst into flames by mistake”.The book includes a few facile contemporary parallels – was the pineapple really the Prada handbag of its day? – and moments when the pineapple-centric view of the world becomes faintly absurd (“war had historically signified trouble for the home-grown pineapple”).

He also commissioned a portrait of himself being presented by the royal gardener with “the first pineapple raised in England”. At that moment, argues Beauman, it became a significant symbol of status.
At the heart of her book is a vivid account of how, from about the 1720s, the home-grown fruit became the ultimate country house status symbol – due to the expense and sheer perverse ingenuity required to produce pineapples in England and later in America. It also soon acquired an exotic image from its strange shape and links with the supposed Edenic innocence of the New World. Charles II served the fruit at a banquet in honour of the French ambassador in 1668 – both because of its rarity value and because it made an implicit statement about English ascendancy in the West Indies. It proved useful aboard ship as an antidote to scurvy and because its acidic juice could help scrub down the deck. The pineapple was discovered in Brazil on Columbus’s second voyage of 1493. This rich and lively biography explores how the fruit has constantly been reinvented in response to changing notions of empire and exoticism, style, status and even sexual politics.

In 1947, the government of Australia sent the future Queen Elizabeth a wedding present – 500 cases of canned pineapple. Although it now beggars belief, “the king of fruits” must then have seemed like a classy gift for royalty. Three decades later, writes Fran Beauman, Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party dealt “perceptions of pineapple chunks a devastating blow” as its hostess from hell tries desperately to impress her neighbours with “dainty” cheese and pineapple on sticks. Sounds a bit dry, but I think it’s one of the spinal, arterial flows within me,” he grins and looks up and there’s that expression again, one Herg?ould have penned: the enthused glee of the intrepid cub reporter sending despatches from distant climes.’The Ice Soldier’ by Paul Watkins is published on 19 January by Faber (£12.99). “It’s set partly just before and then after that book and is really about the whole idea of what getting involved with the profession of writing means, what you think it’s going to be like and then what it really is like. The introspection evident in The Ice Soldier is set to continue with his next book, a follow-up to Stand Before Your God. It’s not the kind of lesson you get in an average inner-city comprehensive Teaching history is, he asserts, “simply telling stories”.