Paperbacks

The life of Muhammad Ali has been much documented – most notably by Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe – but Jonathan Eig’s Ali: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 640pp, £12.99, Oldie price £9.98 inc p&p) was well received and won the biography section of the British Sports Book Awards this year. ‘Ali’s callous philandering is exposed, and his long mental decline from the blows he took is examined in detail,’ wrote Nick Pitt in the Sunday Times. ‘And full justice is done to his extraordinary athletic gifts and [his] playful, courageous personality.’ In the Guardian, Tim Lewis believed ‘Eig’s writing doesn’t have the razzle-dazzle of Wolfe or Mailer, but he’s breezy to read while also being a stickler for detail.’ Lewis summed up: ‘My heart sank a little when I saw there was another Ali biography, and Eig’s doubtless won’t be the last. This one, though, is proof that, even in the most examined lives, there are corners where it is revealing to shine a light.’

‘ Milkman is an impressive, wordy, often funny book and confirms Anna Burns as one of our rising literary stars,’ wrote Adrian Mckinty in the Irish Times about this year’s Booker Prize-winning novel (Faber, 360pp, £8.99). It is set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and, Phil Baker explained in the Sunday Times, ‘centres on an unnamed girl (“middle sister”) who has been sexually pestered by the unpleasant milkman of the title – who is not a real milkman, but a local paramilitary... Against the odds, it is a comedy, of sorts, like a long, jaundiced shaggydog story.’ In the Telegraph, Carl Revely-calder found the book’s pace ‘leisurely at best’ but agreed that it was ‘viciously funny’.

Christian House of the Observer thought Matthew Kneale’s Rome: A History in Seven Sackings (Atlantic, 417pp, £10.99, Oldie price £9.91 inc p&p) a ‘stirring history of the Eternal City’ and ‘heavy on the hostilities’. Each of the historian and novelist’s seven chapters ‘lovingly recreates the city that is about to be destroyed,’ explained Catherine Nixey in the Times. ‘Kneale records everything from the city’s food to its more arcane wooing methods (an ox was essential).’