RETROS

LIGHT A PENNY CANDLE by Maeve Binchy (Arrow £8.99, 848 pp)

ALTHOUGH the late, great Binchy acknowledged that she was ‘no Tolstoy’, she garnered a huge following of fans. one such is actor Tom Hanks who writes: ‘I love her stories,’ praising the writer’s literary skills in a rave introduction to this reprint.

more than 800 gripping pages transport readers to london and Ireland, depicting the enduring friendship between two girls (1940-60). Triumphs, tragedies, an alcoholic wifebeater, a promiscuous seducer, conniving mothers, broken hearts, births, deaths, abortion and heartbreak . . . life in all its glory and ghastliness is here.

It’s mills & Boon with knobs on, the ideal doorstopper to occupy long, dark evenings.

THE DIARY OF A NOBODY by George and Weedon Grossmith (Macmillan £9.99, 224 pp)

POMPOUS Pooter is one of literature’s great comic creations. He aspires to a dignified, genteel life, but is thwarted by stroppy tradesmen, volatile servants, a feckless son and a wife who scoots from the room when he reads aloud his tedious diary.

no one (except him) laughs at his feeble jokes and portentous pronouncements such as ‘Home Sweet Home, that’s my motto’ elicit jaw-dislocating yawns.

Whether tripping over the boot- scraper, falling flat on his back at the mayor’s ball or fuming that he’s a sock short from the laundry, every triviality is meticulously recorded.

It’s all a hoot. our shires and suburbs are for ever packed with potential Pooters, which is why this hilarious Victorian spoof remains so gloriously funny.

SALT ON MY SKIN by Benoite Groult (World Editions £11.99, 264 pp)

OH, no. Save us from frank, feminist ravings on throbbing adultery. groult’s sizzling eulogy to lust, obsession and decades of sneaky, red-hot gettogethers with a man blessed with ‘the buttocks of a toreador’ is truly cringe-making.

an academic free spirit and an uneducated fisherman enjoy rapturous secret rendezvous every few years (both being married, but not to each other) in exotic far-flung lovenests.

Talk about marathons. What with his spectacular manhood ( unflaggingly detailed), her ‘ unwavering desire’ and the seismic effect of ‘the prow of the boat moving into harbour’, it’s no surprise when he (now 50ish) bursts a blood vessel.

a French bestseller in 1988, it will make you laugh.