Dawkins is back, plus a thrilling boxing tale

FEATHERWEIGHT Mick Kitson

(Canongate, £8.99)

It’s the Black Country at the height of the Industrial

Revolution, and nine-year-old Annie, of Romani heritage, is sold for six guineas to bare-knuckle boxer Bill Perry, also known as the Tipton Slasher. Bill buys a pub, but the business is failing as fast as his health. When his attempt to make some money by returning to boxing goes awry, Annie steps into the ring to take his place – setting in motion her rise to pugilistic fame and a breathless series of picaresque adventures.

Kitson has based this fiction on his own ancestors, shaping fanciful family folklore into an even more fantastical novel. Featherweight is by no means a literary heavyweight, but it is great fun, an enormously diverting tale that gives us some memorable characters, headed by a heroine worth cheering for, and some visceral fight scenes set against a well-realised Industrial Revolution backdrop illuminated by the glow of furnaces and heavy with soot.

LOVE IF THAT’S WHAT IT IS Marijke Schermer

(World Editions, £13.99)

After 25 years, Terri feels bored and stifled by her marriage to the dull, predictable David, so she leaves him and their two daughters to be with her more adventurous lover, Lucas. David, 12-year-old Ally and 15-year-old Krista are devastated, left to cope in their separate ways with the break-up of their family and Terri’s abrupt departure. While Krista embarks on her own first relationship in the wake of this huge upheaval, David starts seeing another woman, single mother

Sev, but has to reconcile himself to the fact that she doesn’t want a long-term relationship.

All the parties involved, in fact, want something different, and Schermer’s insightful and engrossing analysis of their complex situation, translated from the Dutch by Hester Velmans, keeps all their perspectives in mind as they adjust to the rearrangement of their family unit and Terri and David both pursue goals which may be unattainable.

BOOKS DO FURNISH A LIFE Richard Dawkins

(Penguin, £10.99)

Science writing is an often undervalued skill. Carl Sagan, to pick one example, inspired an incalculable number of people through his words, and he was far from alone in combining an elegant, lucid prose style with a sense of wonder and purpose in a way that made him a thrilling communicator. Exploring the space where science meets literature, Richard Dawkins’ new book is a miscellany of introductions and forewords written for various other people’s books, bolstered by some reviews and interviews with the likes of Steven Pinker, Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Christopher Hitchens.

Dawkins’ stock has fallen dramatically in recent years, following some problematic public statements and the spikier, more ill-tempered tone that has crept into his uncompromising defence of atheism. But here, as he graciously praises the communicators he admires, his own articulate and eloquent contributions display the very blend of passion and reason it takes to rank alongside them.