MUSTREADS Out now in paperback
BASED ON A TRUE STORY
by Anthony Holden
(S&S £10.99, 384pp)
FOR Anthony Holden, journalism is in his blood. When he was growing up he would accompany his sports reporter grandfather, the former England footballer Ivan Sharpe, to matches.
After Oxford, where he edited the university magazine, he joined the Sunday Times, and the legendary editor Harry Evans became his mentor. Along the way, he found time to write 40 books, including biographies of Prince Charles, Sir Laurence Olivier and Shakespeare.
His memoir of a 50-year career in the glory days of print journalism twinkles with a stellar roll-call of celebrities, from Peter O’Toole and Mick Jagger to cosy lunches with Princess Diana.
The book ends on a poignant note as he describes the stroke he suffered in 2017, aged 70, which left him unable to walk, but still writing with courage and irrepressible chutzpah.
THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU
by Sam Knight (Faber £9.99, 256pp)
ON OCTOBER 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton woke with a feeling of dread. Soon afterwards, the mountain of coal waste above the Welsh village of Aberfan engulfed the school, killing 144 people; 116 were children.
The day before, one of the young victims, ten-yearold Eryl Mai Jones, had dreamed that ‘something black had come down all over [the school]’.
Learning of Eryl’s premonition, psychiatrist John Barker placed a newspaper appeal for others who had foreseen the disaster.
Of 76 respondents, seven — including Ms Middleton — interested Barker so much that he founded The Premonitions Bureau in 1966 to test the accuracy of their visions.
This brilliant account of Barker’s research, by the journalist Sam Knight, is a compelling exploration into the mysteries of the human mind.
THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA
by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sort Of Books £9.99, 432pp)
MAALI ALMEIDA, the antihero of Karunatilaka’s Booker Prize- winning second novel, is dead, his body dismembered and thrown in a lake.
While he now knows the answer to the questions everyone asks about the afterlife — ‘yes’, and ‘just like here but worse’ — he has no idea who killed him.
Maali’s ghost has just one week to wander the world. He hopes to find his murderer, and persuade his friend, Jaki, and her cousin, Dilan, to secure his legacy by publishing his photos of atrocities committed in Sri Lanka’s civil war.
As he races around Colombo, encountering a host of grotesque demons and struggling to communicate between the spectral and human world, Maali’s ghostly quest is a scathing satire of Sri Lanka’s brutal political history, laced with biting humour and deep pathos.