MUSTREADS

FOUR MUMS IN A BOAT by Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg and Frances Davies

(HarperCollins £8.99) AT A time of life when some might be thinking about winding down, four middleaged Yorkshirewomen decided to take up rowing.

They met in 2012. All were busy with work and family life, but their Saturday mornings rowing on the Ouse, before adjourning for coffee and biscuits, soon became a highlight of their week.

Their first attempt at a race ended in humiliation when they were ordered off the river.

So when they decided to enter the 2015 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge — a 3,000-mile row from San Sebastian to Antigua — it was something of a step up.

This account of their experience is bracingly honest about the low points (storms, injury, seasickness and homesickness), as well as the exhilaration of arriving in Antigua to find that they were the oldest women’s crew ever to row the Atlantic.

TRUEVINE by Beth Macy

(Pan £8.99) IN THE tiny town of Truevine, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, two brothers were born who would share a rather strange destiny.

Their parents, Cabell and Harriet Muse, were poor black sharecroppers, but George and Willie were white, with the watery blue eyes and golden hair of albinism.

One day in 1899, the boys, then six and nine, were working in the fields when a stranger took them away.

For the following three decades — as Harriet desperately tried to find her boys — the brothers were exhibited as circus freaks, as far afield as London and New York.

Beth Macy, a journalist who ‘writes about outsiders and underdogs’, spent decades researching the brothers’ story.

Her book is a vivid account of tragedy and exploitation, but also of compassion, resilience and love.

GRIEF WORKS by Julia Samuel

(Penguin £9.99) FOR the past 25 years, Julia Samuel has worked as a grief therapist in private practice and within the NHS. Grief, she argues, is ‘profoundly misunderstood’ and she sets out to explore this hidden emotion.

In chapters devoted to the death of parents, siblings, partners and children, and the challenge of facing one’s own death, she uses case studies to illustrate the different ways in which people grieve.

She gives advice on how to cope with the sadness, anger, despair and selfdestructive impulses that can grip us after the death of someone we love.

Samuel, who was a friend of Princess Diana, offers practical solutions for both living with grief and helping the bereaved.

‘Acknowledge, listen and simply give them time’ is her wise advice.