Out now in paperback
TO WAR WITH THE WALKERS by Annabel Venning
(Hodder £10.99, 336 pp) A PHOTOGRAPH in Annabel Venning’s account of her family in wartime shows the six Walker children in order of height from the youngest, Ruth, a plump toddler, to the eldest, Edward, a grinning schoolboy.
Taken in 1922, the siblings would later be engulfed by a World War which all would survive, but none emerge unscathed.
Annabel, the granddaughter of Walter, the second brother, reconstructs the events that scattered the Walkers across the globe.
Ruth, a nurse, and Harold, a doctor, were each gravely injured while serving at St Thomas’ Hospital; Edward and Walter fought bravely in Italy and Burma; Bee, the beautiful elder daughter, became a war widow, while gentle Peter was brutally tortured by Japanese forces in Malaya.
‘ Nil desperandum’ was the family motto, and this beautifully written biography shows how gallantly the siblings lived up to it.
THE WAY TO THE SEA by Caroline Crampton
(Granta £9.99, 336 pp) ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1984, a small boat sailed up the Thames estuary towards London. Aboard were Caroline Crampton’s parents, who had set off from South Africa almost five months before.
The young couple moved to Kent, where Caroline was born in 1988, but sailing remained a part of family life. She grew up to love the estuary — muddy, windswept, endlessly fascinating. Studying in Oxford and working in London fuelled her passion for the river, and eventually inspired her to follow it from its beginnings as a meagre trickle in a Gloucestershire meadow to the Nore, where the river meets the open sea.
Her elegant book — part memoir, part history — is a captivating love letter to a great waterway.
THE AGE OF LIGHT by Whitney Scharer
(Picador £8.99, 320 pp) LEE MILLER’S life was a chronicle of extraordinary events. Born in 1907 in upstate New York, she modelled for Vogue before moving to Paris in 1929 to train as a painter.
Her beauty mesmerised artists including Dali, Picasso and the American Man Ray, whose muse and lover she became.
Whitney Scharer’s debut novel focuses on this period of Lee’s life, interweaving her account of a passionate and creative partnership with flashes of Lee’s later life, including her career as a wartime photojournalist whose images of concentration camps, and herself bathing in Hitler’s bathtub, featured in Vogue.
With vivid descriptions of Bohemian life and keen observation of the blurred lines between desire, possessiveness and artistic freedom, this is a sensuous evocation of the adventures of a talented and beautiful artist in the heady ferment of 1930s Paris.