10 BOOKS TO BUY NOW
AN ECLECTIC MIX TO ADD TO YOUR SHELVES
Biography
Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik Eve Babitz is the ideal subject for a biography. The sharp-witted LA author knew everyone and did everything, while still somehow remaining under the radar. She ate muffins with Andy Warhol, drank chartreuse with Dalí and played chess with Duchamp. She said she had affairs with Jim Morrison and Harrison Ford, and played a bit-part in The Godfather Part II. Anolik’s biography tells the remarkable story of this “louche, wayward, headlong, hidden genius of Los Angeles”.
Science
Humankind by Rutger Bregman People are kind, and tough times bring out the best of us; that’s the thesis behind this uplifting and compulsively readable mash-up of science, history, psychology, anthropology and economics from the Dutch wunderkind behind Utopia for Realists. Bregman is a “six impossible things before breakfast” kind of writer. If you’re not convinced by one of his plans to change the world, it doesn’t matter: there’ll be another, equally fascinating idea on the very next page.
Fiction
Pew by Catherine Lacey
In this dark fable from the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, a silent stranger is found sleeping in the church of a small American town. As the residents open up about their lives to this enigmatic newcomer, buried anxieties and fears are brought to the surface. Our fiction critic Cal Revely-calder has singled out this “masterly” novel as the very best of the year so far.
Memoir
Thinking Again by Jan Morris At 93, Morris still finds fresh things to surprise and delight her every day – whether it’s a performance of Rachmaninoff on the radio, an episode of Mrs Brown’s Boys on TV, or a herd of pygmy goats at a local ranch. In this gentle diary of her day-to-day life, the Welsh travel writer covers some very serious subjects – in particular, her wife’s struggle with dementia – but the prevailing mood is one of joy in a life well lived.
Poetry
The Air Year by Caroline Bird Nominated last week for a Forward Prize, Bird’s effortlessly enjoyable sixth collection is a book likely to win over readers who normally steer clear of poetry. She pulls off surreal flights of fancy while always staying endearingly down-to-earth, in love poems you’ll want to read aloud: one poem imagines the poet and her lover “locked/ in the amber of the and”.
History
Britain’s War: A New World by Daniel Todman
The closing instalment in Todman’s two-volume history covers 1942-47. Unlike many studies of the war, A New World pays as much attention to the thoughts and feelings of ordinary men and women as to the movements of politicians or troops, drawing on Mass Observation interviews to capture the public mood.
Comics
Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg The Brontës’ early stories of fantastical worlds – inspired by their toy soldiers, and handwritten in tiny books – have been inventively brought to life in this beautiful new graphic novel. There’s a poignant edge to the escapism: Glass Town begins with Charlotte Brontë alone in 1849, in mourning for her late siblings, until she’s whisked back into the imaginary world they once made together.
Food
How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher Amid the grim rationing of the Forties, MFK Fisher defended the wild, sensuous pleasures of food. WH Auden once said of her, “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose”. This reissue of an out-ofprint classic has come not a moment too soon: it’s the perfect time to revisit Fisher’s advice on how “to live most agreeably in a world full of an increasing number of disagreeable surprises”.
Humour
Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Mallory Ortberg A memoir, cunningly disguised as a series of witty essays on everything
from The Golden Girls to Gawain and the Green Knight, peppered with inventive and unashamedly clever spoofs (a Roman philosopher reimagined as a moody teenager, for instance). Somewhere among all this, Ortberg movingly opens up about his family life, his recent gender transition and his Christian faith. A wonderfully weird book from one of America’s most original young humorists.
Lit crit
Illness as Inspiration by Theodore Dalyrmple Not quite a new book, but a newly timely one: overlooked on its publication last year, this eccentric and charmingly old-fashioned book by the prison doctor and Telegraph columnist is ideal bedtime reading for our plague year. In pithy, bite-sized chapters, Dalrymple casts a physician’s eye over poetry by great (and not-sogreat) writers inspired by illness, from poet-doctors John Keats and William Carlos Williams to literary hypochondriacs.