More from Books
Life class
Essays by Michael Peppiatt on the artists who quicken his heart, and encounters between Richard Cork and his favourites, including Jasper Johns, Henry Moore and Gilbert & George
Solo sisters
Gertrude Bell travelled extensively through Turkey before and after the first world war and the author plays dogged detective in her wake
Cut to the chase
It’s a brilliant page-turner device and works perfectly in stories set variously during the Algerian war of independence of the 1950s and Norfolk and London in the present day
Monkey business
A labyrinthine plot involving Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy clan form the basis of the latest in James Ellroy’s planned new ‘LA Quintet’
Hail dairy
A lifetime obsession with milk has resulted in 350 numbered, lightly edited and loosely connected remarks about milk, its colour, its smell and much else. Weird or what?
The pen and the plant
A sumptuous coffee-table book in which writers from Henry James to Frances Hodgson Burnett are briefly glimpsed while passing through the beautiful spaces that outlast them
Parallel lives
Aged 69, the travel writer had a stroke and spent his last 20 years as a hemiplegic – and writing this memoir of his father’s life intertwined with snapshots of his own
The greed and the glory
The American author turns her attention to colonial injustice in a tale about a servant girl who flees a blighted English settlement in 17th-century Jamestown
Love in Middle England
A delicate, funny and generous-hearted novel about thwarted love and its aftermath in a 1960s Middle England
Double trouble
Naomi Klein had got used to being confused with Naomi Wolf. Then Covid hit and it was no longer a joke
Quiet brilliance
The author once takes a big issue and, with her characteristic quiet brilliance, illuminates it in a small homely setting
Word association
From an employee of a tram company in Birkenhead to the deeply eccentric Alexander Ellis, a celebration of the army of unpaid contributors to the first edition of the OED
The breath of life
Snatches of memoir, poetry and observation from a writer whose main preoccupation is recording the lives of others
‘I am a strange owl’
Jenni Fagan dug up all the files and archives on herself as a baby in care to write this stunning and poignant memoir
The restless soul
The author’s Japanese ghost stories brought him fame and fortune – but his own life was even stranger than fiction
Bad buddy story
A 2023 book about a 1987 film set in 1969, in which multiple characters mourn the end of an era, told through interviews, memorabilia and testimonials from besotted fans
What happened in Berlin?
How it all began: Di Taverner, Service legend David Cartwright and the rest of the Slow Horses make themselves known to the reader in an origin story disguised as a follow-up
Remembrance of feasts past
In 1927, A.J. Liebling sailed from America to study medieval literature at the Sorbonne. Instead, he taught himself how to eat French food
The woman who set our country in a roar
Such was the emotion Anne Boleyn inspired in Henry VIII. But before long that scalding love had turned to a brutalising hatred of his second wife, culminating in her bloody beheading
Fish out of water
As a one-nation Tory, Rory Stewart was not a good fit in the party’s new incarnation. We discover how his desire to make the world a better place was always going to work against him
Sinister science
Set in the near future, the novel examines what is necessary to make us human – while showcasing the base behaviour of those lucky enough to be born with the right genes
A born rebel
Four days after she last saw her, Natasha Walter’s mother Ruth took her own life. The loss throws Natasha into a desperate search for meaning by examining Ruth’s peace-activist past and beyond
A secret sisterhood
Many thousands of women acted as messengers, radio operators and double agents behind enemy lines in both world wars. Here, these resilient and resolute pioneers are retrieved from the mists of history
Triumph and tragedy
England’s 1966 World Cup triumph owed much to the team’s dedicated manager, loved by his players but monstrously treated by those in charge of the FA
The changing face of Ireland
A dead poet’s dangerous aura continues to haunt his daughter and 23-year old granddaughter in this story of an unhappy family set in rapidly changing Ireland
