Paperback picks

Don’t Laugh, It’ll

Only Encourage Her by Daisy May Cooper (Penguin, £10.99)

The star and co-creator of This Country grew up in Cirencester in a family on the breadline and she writes very well on the humiliations of poverty, without losing her sense of humour.

She and brother Charlie worked as cleaners while writing comedy scripts together, and it was years before their perseverance paid off.

But this book proves it’s absurd for anybody to think they know more about being funny than Daisy May Cooper. It’s a riot from start to finish.

Jake Kerridge

These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, £9.99)

In this wide-ranging collection of essays, the award-winning author of The Dutch House and Bel Canto reflects on her life, from her love for her “three fathers” – her mother married three times – to falling for her husband. As well as reflecting on the way a year without shopping changed her, she contemplates how she made a choice between writing and becoming a mother.

The Marmalade Diaries by Ben Aitken (Icon, £10.99)

In October 2020, Aitken answered an advert offering a room in a London house for unfeasibly low rent. In exchange, he would do odd jobs for his new housemate, recently widowed Winnie, 85. Aitken moved in just in time for lockdown.

The more Aitken came to love eccentric, sharptongued Winnie, the more heartbreaking it felt that she had a difficult relationship with her grown-up children, being too buttoned-up to express her love.

Aitken is a biographer worthy of an extraordinary ordinary woman.

Jake Kerridge