MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

THE HUSBAND HUNTERS by Anne de Courcy

(W&N £9.99) BETWEEN 1870 and 1914, an invasion of wealthy, attractive young American women arrived in Europe, bent on marrying into the aristocracy. From the unhappy Consuelo Vanderbilt, who spent her wedding morning in tears, before making a miserable marriage to the Duke of Marlborough, to the racy Jennie Jerome, who married Lord Randolph Churchill and became the mother of Winston Churchill, the American heiresses — outspoken, educated and exquisitely dressed — outshone their shy and dowdy British counterparts.

Still, having bagged their Earls, the newly ennobled Americans didn’t always settle down to a life of wedded bliss and, as Anne de Courcy explains in her meticulously researched and sparklingly witty history, the lack of plumbing in stately homes appalled some . . .

SOUND by Bella Bathurst

(Profile £8.99) IN THE summer of 1998, when she was 27, writer Bella Bathurst became deaf.

Her hearing had been deteriorating and an audiologist confirmed that she needed hearing aids.

If her friends were hardly sympathetic — most of them just laughed, and one said, ‘You’re not going deaf! You just don’t listen’ — Bella’s response was furious denial.

She wrote six books in a decade, researched the experience of others who had lost their hearing, from Beethoven to General Sir Peter de la Billiere. ‘I fought the deafness — and myself — for as long as I could. Then I just got sad.’

A decade later, pioneering surgery offered her the chance to regain her lost sense. This is a brave and elegant memoir of the infinite nuances of hearing and listening.

GASTROPHYSICS by Professor Charles Spence

(Viking £9.99) CHARLES SPENCE’S grandfather had a grocer’s shop in Bradford. He used to crush coffee beans underfoot behind the counter when customers came in, to release an enticing smell.

He had discovered olfactory sensory marketing — though he wouldn’t have called it that — so perhaps it’s no surprise that his grandson became an Oxford University academic specialising in ‘gastrophysics’.

Professor Spence has worked with chef Heston Blumenthal, who provides the foreword, declaring that: ‘We eat with our eyes, ears, nose, memory, imagination and our gut.’

He explains how our perception of food is affected by all our senses.

Among other bizarre foodie facts is the revelation that food in motion is perceived to be fresher — hence all those M&S ads of oozing chocolate pudding.