MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

GONE by Min Kym

(Penguin £9.99) WHEN the 1696 Stradivarius belonging to Korean- born violinist Min Kym was stolen at Euston Station in 2010, her grief was so intense that, for a while, she could no longer play.

Kym, a former child prodigy, writes vividly of the bond she had with her instrument: ‘It felt as if all her life, my Strad had been waiting for me, as I had been waiting for her.’

The story almost had a happy ending: the thieves were caught and the Strad recovered. But the violin’s insurers, who now owned it, sold it at auction for £1.3 million, an amount beyond Kym’s means, and she lost her beloved Strad a second time.

It is a heart-breaking end to a passionate musical love affair.

A DIFFERENT CLASS OF MURDER by Laura Thompson

(Head of Zeus £9.99) SHORTLY before 10pm on November 7, 1974, a distraught woman, covered from ‘head to toe in blood’, ran into the Plumbers Arms pub in Lower Belgrave Street, London, shouting: ‘Help me, help me, I’ve just escaped from being murdered . . . he’s murdered my nanny.’ The woman was Lady Lucan, the unfortunate nanny was Sandra Rivett and the alleged assailant was Lord Lucan, whose subsequent disappearance has been the subject of speculation ever since.

In this biography, updated since Lady Lucan’s death last year, Laura Thompson approaches the mystery with forensic skill. Using testimony from those closest to the events of that night, she reaches a suitably enigmatic conclusion.

UNCOMMON PEOPLE by David Hepworth

(Penguin £9.99) ‘THE age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed,’ writes Hepworth in his chronicle of the glory years of the great rock stars.

By his reckoning, these began in 1955 with Little Richard’s recording of Tutti Frutti and ended in 1995 with the advent of Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen, ‘the first rock-star nerd’.

‘By the 21st century,’ Hepworth laments, ‘the term [ rock star] had been spread so thin as to be meaningless’.

A music journalist and former presenter of the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, Hepworth structures his knowledgeable and entertaining book around a significant date in each year from 1955 to 1995.

On July 6, 1957, a skiffle group called The Quarrymen, fronted by a young John Lennon, played their first gig. On August 16, 1977, Elvis died, and July 13, 1985, saw Bob Geldof organise Live Aid — a ‘carnival of enlightened self-interest’.