MUSTREADS Out now in paperback
GETTING BETTER
by Michael Rosen (Ebury Press €15.40, 272pp) IN 2020, the writer Michael Rosen was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. He spent 40 days in a coma — eventually making a remarkable recovery. But as he reflects in his story of survival, ‘I am not who I was.’
Covid was only the latest of the life-changing events that Rosen, now 77, has experienced. From his baby brother dying from whooping cough, to learning about members of his family who were murdered in the Holocaust, being sacked from his job and — most heartbreaking of all — the devastating death from meningitis of his 18year-old son, Eddie, Rosen has endured a lifetime of troubles and tragedies.
In this inspiring book, he suggests that such events may shape us, but they don’t define us.
‘Getting better’ is possible, and with courage, wisdom and humour, Rosen’s memoir shows us how to do it.
PAST LYING
by Val McDermid (Little Brown €12.99, 512pp) THE streets of Edinburgh in April 2020 are eerily empty. When Jason Murray, DCI Karen Pirie’s accidentprone colleague at the Historic Cases Unit, takes a call from an observant archivist at the National Library, the unsolved missing persons case of Edinburgh University student Lara Hardie becomes a live investigation.
While cataloguing the papers of Jake Stein, a scandal-hit crime novelist who died the previous year, the archivist noticed striking similarities between Lara’s disappearance and the plot of Stein’s unfinished novel.
Soon Karen and her colleagues are immersed in discovering the shocking truth hidden among the novel’s dark layers of betrayal and revenge.
McDermid’s wickedly entertaining double mystery blends a brilliantly twisty plot with compassion for the personal tragedies inflicted by the pandemic.
DON’T THINK DEAR
by Alice Robb (Oneworld €15.95, 304pp) FROM earliest childhood, Robb wanted to be a ballerina. Aged nine, she was accepted by the School of American Ballet (SAB), but beneath the exquisite spectacle beloved of ballet audiences, Robb found a dark reality.
The SAB was founded in 1948 by the Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine, and his exacting training methods lived on, with teachers echoing his instruction, ‘Don’t think, dear’.
Mixing personal memoir with the experiences of her fellow students at SAB, and famous ballerinas such as Misty Copeland, Robb explores a behind-thescenes world of body shaming, anorexia, injuries, racism and sexism.
Ejected from the ballet school as her body began to develop, Robb made a successful career as a writer, and maintains a love-hate relationship with a beautiful art that demands such terrible sacrifices from its very talented performers.