Books
The view from the lab
The neuroscientist Camilla Nord places considerable emphasis on scanning technology, but has disappointingly little to suggest in the way of effective new treatments
Two for the road
Jane Glover follows the rapturous Wolfgang around Venice, Bologna, Florence and Naples on three journeys that would change the young composer’s life
Scent and smoke and sweat
The world would never be quite the same again after we first glimpsed the casino of Royale-les-Eaux at three in the morning, says Philip Hensher
The bloody prequel
Following her translation of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson has turned her hand to the Iliad – and it is a triumph, writes A.E. Stallings
A world of your own
How the search for a birthday present led to the founding of a unique business
Hope in hell
Brought up by a tyrannical father in the postcard beauty of Montego Bay, this is a story of the author’s salvation through literature and the ferocity of maternal love
The sacred and profane
The great American writer is ill-served by this new biography – but luckily we still have her own writing to tell us who she truly was
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
By hook or by crook
Anne Henderson has produced a series of important books on the Menzies era. Her latest volume adds to this considerable…
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
‘The bedrock of my existence’
Michael Peppiatt has had a lifelong obsession with Alberto Giacometti – and it shows in this perfect biography, says Lynn Barber
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
