LETTER FROM AMERICA

Michael Wolff returned to torment Donald Trump with Siege (Little, Brown, £20), which picks up where Fire and Fury left off in February 2018, and ends with the March 2019 report into Russian electoral meddling. Wolff gleefully depicts White House catfights and a president who veers between “raging and vengeful” and “lazy, disengaged and even self-satisfied”. It’s a rollicking read, but lacks the punch of Fire and Fury. Perhaps Trump’s madness has lost its ability to shock.

More Americans are now dying from opioid overdoses than car crashes, and in Fentanyl, Inc (Scribe, £14.99) Ben Westhoff exposes a “brandnew drug epidemic”.

It’s a sucker-punch of a read, cinematic in scope, zooming in to scenes around the world – undercover in a drug factory in China; with the cartels in Mexico; among middle-class youngsters in Dallas dying in droves.

Any light relief from Hollywood? Fat chance. In January, Harvey Weinstein is set to go on trial, and two books from rival reporting teams – She Said (Bloomsbury, £20) by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of the New York Times, and Catch and Kill

(Fleet, £20) by Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker – tell how they broke the story within weeks of one another in October 2017. Catch and Kill is the pacier of the two, and jam-packed with skulduggery and subterfuge.

The Democrat front-runners for the 2020 nomination all have books out. Joe Biden’s Promise Me, Dad (Macmillan, £16.99) is a poignant memoir about his political battles and his son’s slow death from cancer in 2015. Elizabeth Warren’s This Fight Is Our Fight (William Collins, £10.99) is a passionate, folksy manifesto. But the surprise hit so far has been Pete Buttigieg, the gay, Arabicspeaking mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The odds are against him, but Shortest Way Home (John Murray, £20), his endearing memoir, might just restore your optimism.

Harriet Alexander