Paperbacks

‘Adam’s tale is delivered in spare prose’

‘To an extent rarely seen in Europe since the 17th century,’ writes Neil Macgregor in Living with the Gods (Penguin, pp432, £12.99), ‘faith now shapes large parts of the global public debate.’ The former director of the British Museum’s book ‘comprises 30 wide-ranging and sumptuously illustrated chapters exploring religious ideas, belief and practice’, explained Nick Spencer in the Financial Times. ‘[Macgregor’s] artefacts range from Alaskan seal-gut parkas to Japanese house shrines, from Benin bronzes to Sassanian coins. All religious life is here.’ What belief system, if any, Macgregor himself professes is impossible to tell, John Carey wrote in the Sunday

Times. ‘He maintains scrupulous scholarly objectivity, writing respectfully about all the main religions, and sensitively about ways of feeling beyond our understanding, such as the link between humans and the spirits of the land in Pacific Island communities. His ideal is a society in which different religions coexist in peace and mutual toleration, so he is unwilling to criticise any religious observance, however horrible.’ Caroline Moorhead in the Guardian thought the book ‘scholarly’ and ‘elegantly written’… and it was the ‘interweaving of history and the links between time and place’ that made

the book ‘so enjoyable and so impressive’.

Golden Child (Faber, 272pp, £8.99) is about ‘a family from Trinidad – the native land of author Claire Adam, who left her home country to be educated in the US and now lives in London’, explained Jane Bradley in the Scotsman. It tells the story of two very different twins – one who has always been considered difficult and odd, the other widely believed to be a genius. One afternoon, one twin goes missing… ‘Adam’s tale is delivered in spare prose with an acute understanding of how much pain can be inflicted by the people closest to you,’ explained Siobhan Murphy in the Times. ‘Overall, this book manages to combine two things rarely bound together in the spine: a sensitive depiction of family life and the page-flicking urgency of a thriller,’ concluded Rowan Hisayo Buchanan in the Guardian. It won the Desmond Elliott prize for debut fiction.

‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear / Who has written such volumes of stuff. / Some think him ill-tempered and queer, / But a few find him pleasant enough. / His mind is concrete and fastidious, /His nose is remarkably big; / His visage is more or less hideous, /His beard it resembles a wig.’ ‘Edward Lear’s famous self-portrait in verse neatly captures the man in all his great Victorian oddity,’ thought Christopher Hart, who was reviewing Jenny Uglow’s biography Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (Faber, 656pp, £12.99) in the Sunday Times. This ‘sumptuously produced’ biography is ‘richly detailed and astutely empathetic, a splendid portrait of this remarkable man – a landscape painter of only middling talent, it must be said, but a peerless creator of nonsense’. Robert Mccrum in the Guardian believed ‘If ever there was an English national literary treasure, he must be Edward Lear… one of those English one-offs who are treasured because they seem to suggest that there are no more important things to do than paint or write, and who embody a benign, provisional and above all amateur spirit.’ However, Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Times had reservations: ‘Jenny Uglow takes us, month by month, year by year, through [Lear’s] adult life. This is impossible to do, I’m afraid, without causing a degree of tedium.’