MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

SQUIRREL PIE by Elisabeth Luard (Bloomsbury £9.99)

‘AS A FOOD writer by trade and traveller whenever I get the chance, my interest lies in how — and why and what — the rest of the world prepares its daily dinner.’

Author and journalist Elisabeth Luard has sampled the daily dinners of people across the globe, from Uruguay to Hawaii and Sardinia to Tasmania.

In this engaging hybrid of travel book, memoir and cookbook, she recalls some of her most memorable meals.

They include a feast of bouboutie (Cretan snail stew); a squirrel pot pie made with apples and cream, as recommended by the novelist E. Annie Proulx; and macaroni cheese made with oysters, a recipe collected in Tasmania, which originated with the English food writer and florist Constance Spry.

Recipes at the end of each chapter offer readers the opportunity to recreate the flavour of Luard’s exotic travels.

THE RIVIERA SET by Mary S. Lovell (Abacus £10.99)

SINCE the 19th century, the French Riviera has been the playground of the rich, the beautiful and the flamboyant.

Mary S. Lovell’s account of this tainted paradise focuses on a house and the people who lived in it between 1930 and 1960.

The Chateau de l’Horizon was built on the coast between Cannes and Juanles-Pins for the American society hostess Maxine Elliott. Born Jessica Dermot in 1868, she sagaciously used her sultry good looks and modest acting talent to secure a considerable fortune and the entree into British high society.

The grandest of her social lions was Winston Churchill, pictured whizzing down the Chateau’s waterslide in his bathing trunks.

But Maxine’s neighbours also included Wallis Simpson, Churchill’s daughter-in-law Pamela Digby and the novelist Somerset Maugham, who memorably described the Riviera as ‘a sunny place for shady people’.

EVELYN WAUGH: A LIFE REVISITED by Philip Eade (W&N £10)

IT IS just over half-a-century since the novelist Evelyn Waugh died. Philip Eade’s new biography draws on the family archives, including some previously unpublished material, to offer ‘a fresh portrait of the man by revisiting key episodes throughout his life and focusing on his most meaningful relationships’.

Eade’s interest is primarily in Waugh the man, rather than his novels: ‘Evelyn Waugh could hardly have been easier to understand and enjoy on the page, yet the peculiar traits of his character were often harder to fathom.’

Nevertheless, he does his best, examining Waugh’s unhappy first marriage, his love affair with his Oxford contemporary, Alastair Graham, and his tendency to fall deeply in love with girls who didn’t reciprocate his adoration.

Pacy and gossipy, it’s a welcome reminder of the deep feeling and lambent elegance of Evelyn Waugh’s own writing.