BOOKMARKS

A LIFE IN THE DAY Hunter Davies Loot.co.za (R166)

HUNTER Davies’s latest memoir, a sequel to his account of his Carlisle childhood, The Co-Op’s

Got Bananas, is dedicated to his late wife, the novelist Margaret Forster.

Trenchant, self-contained and beloved, she is a constant presence in the book, which begins with her marriage to Davies in 1960 and ends with her death from cancer on February 8, 2016.

Theirs was a writing marriage: Forster gained early success when her novel, Georgy

Girl, was made into a film starring Charlotte Rampling, while Davies worked for The Sunday Times. With three children, their family life was a vibrant mixture of domesticity and glamour.

Moving, funny and brilliantly readable, this is an evocative portrait of a marriage and an era.

– Daily Mail

BLUE John Sutherland Loot.co.za (R160)

IN APRIL 2013, John Sutherland was six months into his job as borough commander at Southwark, in south London, when he began to think “I don’t know if I can do this any more”.

His descent into profound depression was the result of many years of accumulated stress, danger, pity and horror. “This job brings you into repeated contact with every form of human sadness: death and grief, wickedness and violence, the lonely, the lost and the hurting,” he writes.

“As a society, I don’t think we have even begun to understand the compound impact on police officers of repeated exposure to extreme trauma,” he adds.

This courageous, finely written book is a timely invitation to think more deeply about what we ask of police. – Daily Mail

THE PARENTATIONS Kate Mayfield Loot.co.za (R279)

HIGH in the mountains of Norway lies a lake that confers “extended mortality” on those who drink from it.

Among them are a couple forced to hide from those hunting them and their secret.

They send their baby son to his aunt, Clovis Fowler, in 18th-century London for safe-keeping. Clovis, a malign force of nature and a woman without principle, presses the child on to her ex-neighbours, reclusive sisters Constance and Verity Fitzgerald.

When Clovis snatches the boy back, the devastated sisters devote the many years ahead to finding him.

Spanning centuries, this is an exuberant, vividly imagined and structurally triumphant novel with a strong Dickensian undertone. – Daily Mail

ALL RIVERS RUN FREE Natasha Carthew Loot.co.za (R268)

IN A dystopian future, pill-popping, gin-swilling Ia Pendilly lives with her abusive second cousin and lover, Branner, in a caravan on the north Cornish coast. She’s a loner who’s grown “good at enduring”, as an orphan who longs for a family of her own, but has suffered a series of miscarriages.

Branner is increasingly absent and, while he’s away, she finds a young girl washed up on the beach, revives her and takes her in. Emboldened, they embark on a journey into the lawless country outside.

The idiosyncratic writing style needs adjusting to, as the rhythm of the language is hypnotic and the powerful imagery takes over. The raw energy and beauty of the landscape are wellevoked as the pair search for freedom and home. – Daily Mail