MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

THE LIGHT IN THE DARK by Horatio Clare

(Elliott & Thompson £9.99, 224 pp) ‘FOR all its gilding, I shrink slightly at autumn, as if I too lose leaves and thin, because I have come to fear winter,’ writes Horatio Clare.

He lives in the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire, where they take a brisk view of winter: ‘We’re northern, it’s just snow.’

However, Clare is less hardy. For him, winter brings a paralysing misery which is indistinguishable from madness.

Keeping a journal was Clare’s attempt to banish his seasonal depression. Beginning in mid-October, it traces his progress through the dark months of winter until spring.

Sinking into a despair so deep that his long-suffering wife Rebecca tells him she ‘can’t breathe’, Clare finds hope in redemptive moments of conviviality, love and delight in the natural world.

PRIME MOVERS by Ferdinand Mount

(S&S £10.99, 448 pp) NO MATTER how complicated the deeds of famous men and women during their lifetime, history tends to make a simple, shorthand judgment of their character and achievements, seeing them as mostly Good or Bad.

In his thought-provoking collection of essays, the novelist and political commentator Ferdinand Mount reconsiders the reputations of 11 great men, including Pericles, Jesus and Karl Marx, and one woman — Mary Wollstonecraft.

Stripping away the varnish of received opinion, Mount takes a sharp, and sometimes subversive, view of his subjects’ influence on their times and our own.

But he insists that his book is ‘not a collection of hatchet jobs’. Instead, it is an elegant and erudite reassessment of some of history’s most influential political thinkers.

HAZARDS OF TIME TRAVEL by Joyce Carol Oates

(4th Estate £8.99, 336 pp) ‘ THEY would not have come for me, naively I drew their attention to me.’ Adriane Strohl, the clever and rebellious 17- year- old heroine of Joyce Carol Oates’s 46th novel, is arrested on the day she is due to give the leavers’ speech at her high school.

Oates’s novel is set in mid 21st-century America, which has become a totalitarian state where individuals who deviate from the rules enforced by the Department of Homeland Security are executed or sent into exile.

Adriane’s sentence is to be ‘teletransported’ to a university in Wainscotia, ‘a place that exists only by way of special access’.

Here, renamed Mary Ellen Enright, she discovers that she has been sent back in time to the Fifties — long before she was even born.

Oates’s dystopian fiction is irresistibly disturbing.