Out now in paperback
THE OLD MAN AND THE SAND EEL
by Will Millard (Penguin £9.99, 336 pp) In fIshIng mythology, no catch is ever as big as the one that got away.
As the author and TV presenter Will Millard tried to film himself landing the biggest sand eel he had ever caught — ‘a cast-iron miniature record breaker’ — the inevitable happened: his eel slithered off the hook.
It was ‘my best chance of making it onto the list of official record breakers, and I had completely blown it’.
But that fugitive eel proved to be a blessing, for it made Will reconsider his relationship with fishing, and returned him to the more innocent days of his childhood, when his passion for angling was sparked and nurtured by his fisherman grandfather and his wellworn copy of John Wilson’s fishing Encyclopedia.
fishing is a reflective pastime, and Will’s engaging memoir of a fisherman’s odyssey around the wild waters of Britain is an affectionate meditation on nature, love and family bonds.
THERE ARE NO GROWN-UPS
by Pamela Druckerman (Doubleday £14.99, 288 pp) If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a french café. It’s like a public referendum on your face,’ writes Pamela Druckerman. When she moved to Paris in her early 30s, waiters called her ‘mademoiselle’. But as the years passed, it turned into ‘madame’, and she knew that middle-age had arrived. In this funny and perceptive guide to growing older, the bestselling author of french Children Don’t Throw food considers the pitfalls and pleasures of turning 40 — the age when, according to her epigraph, ‘We become who we are’.
In chapters on how To Be Mortal (Druckerman was diagnosed with non-hodgkin lymphoma in her early 40s), and how To have sex (Druckerman doesn’t necessarily recommend the threesome her husband asked for as a 40th birthday present), she reminds her readers that middle-age can be ‘the best age of all’.
WARLIGHT
by Michael Ondaatje (Vintage £8.99, 304 pp) for writers of fiction, from J.K. rowling to Ian McEwan, the adventures of children whose parents are absent — removed from the family by death or duty — offer a rich vein of inspiration. Michael ondaatje’s Warlight, set in London in 1945, begins with an announcement. The parents of 16- year- old rachel Williams and her brother, nathaniel, are leaving to spend a year in singapore, where their father has been promoted to run the unilever office.
In their absence, the siblings will be cared for by their lodger, a mysterious, diffident figure known as The Moth. ‘I am still uncertain whether the period that followed disfigured or energised my life,’ reflects nathaniel, looking back, a dozen years later.
ondaatje’s novel beautifully evokes the mysterious atmosphere of blacked-out wartime London, where shady characters roam the darkened streets and nothing, not even a mother’s departure, is what it seems.