MUSTREADS ONE: MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Out now in paperback
THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE
by Richard Osman (Penguin £8.99, 448pp) THERE is a treat in store for anyone who finished Richard Osman’s debut, The Thursday Murder Club, with a sense of regret at parting from the resident sleuths at Coopers Chase retirement home.
The Club has a new case to solve and it is one that begins very close to home, when Elizabeth’s louche ex-husband Douglas, an MI5 agent nearing retirement, takes refuge at Coopers Chase.
Douglas was investigating Martin Lomax, a powerful local villain with a lovely garden and a contacts book of international criminals, when a bag-full of diamonds went missing.
As the body count rises, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ron offer their assistance to Fairhaven police. Funny, poignant and packed with jeopardy, The Man Who Died Twice keeps its surprises coming until the very last sentence. by Peter Schmeichel (Hodder £10.99, 416pp) ‘WHEN you give your life to something, it has to have some kind of meaning. Because if not, then what?’ writes the former Manchester United goalkeeper, Peter Schmeichel.
He attempts to answer that question with an account not just of his
footballing years, but of the decades before and after. He grew up in Copenhagen: his mum was a nurse, his father a Polish jazz musician and unwilling double agent. But Schmeichel reflects that he also had two footballing father figures: Sir Alex Ferguson and Per Bjerregaard.
It is an unusual footballer who quotes the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, but that’s what this most thoughtful and engaging of goalies does in his wise memoir: ‘Life can only be understood backwards,’ said Kierkegaard, ‘but it must be lived forwards.’
THE STRANDING
by Kate Sawyer (Coronet £8.99, 368 pp) FORMER schoolteacher Ruth books a ticket to New Zealand, promising to return in a year’s time.
But when she lands, it is clear that something is very wrong. Confused, Ruth heads for the whale conservation centre where she had planned to volunteer, only to find a beached whale dying.
As she frantically pours water over it, a stranger, Nik, appears. He knows the news that Ruth has missed on her journey: nuclear apocalypse is imminent. Survival instinct leads them to take refuge within the whale’s cavernous mouth.
Emerging raw and blistered but alive, they find the world utterly changed. Kate Sawyer’s powerful first novel contrasts the disappointments of Ruth’s past with her struggle to live with Nik in a transformed world, whose sorrows and challenges also offer hope for a different future.