MUSTREADS Out now in paperback

FIRE AND FURY by Michael Wolff

(Little Brown £8.99, 464pp) ‘TRUMP thought emotionally, not strategically,’ writes journalist Michael Wolff. It is the only understated sentence in his devastating account of the first 200 days of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Wolff’s access to the West Wing in that period was ‘quite close to an actual fly on the wall’, and the scenes he observed would seem outrageous if they were portrayed in a movie.

Indeed, as Wolff points out, Trump’s decision to run for President resembled Mel Brooks’s film, The Producers, whose protagonists deliberately set out to create a show so bad that it is bound to fail. Trump solemnly promised his wife, Melania, that there was no way he could win.

Wolff’s savagely funny pen portraits of the President and his befuddled acolytes make his book read like a pageturning black comedy. You keep having to remind yourself that it is all real.

EAT, DRINK, RUN by Bryony Gordon

(Headline £7.99, 288pp) ‘AS A young journalist in my 20s I would see joggers whizzing around the streets in the early morning as I returned home from a night out, the self-loathing seeping into my bones as the sun rose alongside their sap,’ writes Bryony Gordon. ‘I thought these people were weird, truth be told.’

She is not a natural runner — ‘Until, one day, I realised that I was.’ Gordon’s previous memoirs, The Wrong Knickers and Mad Girl, charted her struggles with eating disorders, depression and addiction.

Eat, Drink, Run, which she describes as ‘a SORT-OF-SELFHELP-MEMOIR’, is an account of how she progressed from being a dedicated couch potato to running the London Marathon. Brave, funny and deliciously readable, Eat, Drink, Run encourages us all to begin putting one foot in front of the other.

HIRED by James Bloodworth

(Atlantic £12.99, 288pp) ‘EARLY in 2016...I left London to explore a side of life that is usually hidden from view.’

To discover the reality of low-paid work in Britain, the journalist James Bloodworth decided to follow George Orwell’s example and experience it for himself, spending six months taking whatever minimum wage job he was offered.

His account begins at the Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, Staffordshire, where he and his colleagues ‘carried a hand-held device that tracked our every move as if we were convicts out on house arrest’.

He spent time as a care worker in Blackpool, as a renewals consultant for Admiral insurance in Wales and as an Uber driver in London.

His elegant and frequently shocking book is a thoughtprovoking journey into a ‘dark, insecure world’.