MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

(4th Estate £9.99) THERE are two kinds of digging: the kind that you do before planting seeds and the digging done by journalists in the hope of bringing to light difficult or shameful secrets.

In his memoir, Allan Jenkins engages in both types and the first proves a much-needed antidote to the second.

Plot 29 is Jenkins’s London allotment, where he grows heritage beans, courgettes, baby squash and herbs. His fellow allotment-holders form a kind of family and planting summons childhood memories of a ‘magical summer’ of gardening with his brother and their foster parents.

But Jenkins’s childhood was far from idyllic.

Interwoven with the month-by-month account of his allotment’s progress is a moving description of his search for his birth parents and his poignant regret at not being able to take care of his brother Christopher. (ouP £12.99) THE British are a nation of animal lovers, though, over the centuries, some of our behaviour towards creatures in our care has been anything but loving.

In her captivating book, Caroline Grigson traces the history of Britain’s menageries, from their earliest origins to the foundation of the London Zoo in 1828.

Records of royal collections date back centuries. Henry I stocked a park in Oxfordshire with lions, leopards, camels and lynxes, while in 1204, King John established a royal menagerie at the Tower of London, which remained open until 1835.

It was not the preserve of royalty, however: Samuel Pepys owned a monkey, an eagle and a lion cub.

While Grigson’s book is sometimes harrowing, it also celebrates our passion for exotic wildlife. F*** YOU VERY MUCH by Danny Wallace (Penguin £8.99) IS OUR society getting ruder? When you consider the vicious ‘trolling’ of public figures, not to mention road rage and people who make loud phone calls in the quiet coaches of trains, it certainly seems so.

Bestselling author Danny Wallace is both pained and fascinated by what he describes as the New Rudeness. ‘It pours out of our phones, tumbles from our TVs, dominates the cultural conversation and I firmly believe it threatens to overwhelm us.’

The trigger for Wallace’s polemic was a miserable bank holiday encounter, when he and his family waited for more than an hour to be served by the surly proprietor of a food stall.

Wallace’s persuasive and very funny book is a rallying cry for civility.