Biography

Elizabeth Jane Howard Artemis Cooper John Murray €39.50

The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, above, was talented and beautiful, yet happiness eluded her. This elegant biography exposes the shocking childhood foundation of her future problems, and follows her through a string of affairs with unavailable men such as writer Laurie Lee and poet Cecil Day Lewis.

At The Existentialist Café Sarah Bakewell Chatto & Windus €23.79

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were the king and queen of the existentialist school of philosophy. This quirky, funny, clear and passionate book seeks to explain existentialism through reference to their lives, and the lives of their forebears and contemporaries.

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy Paul Howard Picador, €15.99

The extraordinary story of Guinness heir Tara Browne whose legendary charm made him the toast of Sixties London, forging connections with the likes of the Rolling Stones and – according to John Lennon – serving as the tragic inspiration for one of The Beatles’ best loved songs with his premature death aged just 21.

Guilty Thing Frances Wilson Bloomsbury €35

Opium addict, friend – well, stalker – of Wordsworth and Coleridge, inventor of not one, but two literary genres, obsessed by murder, Thomas de Quincey was eccentric, exciting and unpredictable and Wilson has produced a brilliant, giddy-making, hallucinatory portrait.

The Fall Of The House Of Wilde Emer O’Sulllivan Bloomsbury €21

An engrossing examination of how the great writer was shaped by his upbringing and by his unconventional parents: Jane, his mother, a poet and campaigner for women’s rights; and William, his father, a leading surgeon, whose disgrace would devastate the family.