Give them a good read
LUCY LETHBRIDGE picks the best books to buy for your loved ones this Christmas
The Fox and the Star by Coralie Bickford-smith has been a surprise
bestseller (Penguin hardback £14.99, Hatchards price £13.49; paperback £7.99, Hatchards
price £7.19). Ostensibly written for children, this tale of a fox in a wood, searching for his friend the star, is so beautiful to look at that it may well appeal more to adults than children (who rarely have much aesthetic discernment). The opening lines will grab every listener: ‘Once there was a Fox who lived in a deep, dense forest...’
Two splendid books from Mitchell Beazley will absorb the toper; they are coffee-table books but not about coffee. The World Atlas of Beer by Tim Webb and Stephen Beaumont (£25, Hatchards price £22.50) is an exhaustive, illustrated guide to all the beers of the world, every one of them drawing a different flavour and style from the environment it emerges from, and the ingredients used. What fun they must have had researching and compiling it. World Atlas of Tea by Krisi Smith (£20, Hatchards price £18) is a sumptuously illustrated compendium of the history, uses and creation of one of the oldest beverages in the world ‘from the leaf to the cup’. There are pictures and descriptions of tea being picked in the cool mountains where the leaf flourishes from Africa to South America, and notes on how it is mixed, brewed, processed and drunk.
The New Yorker Book of the 50s: Story of a Decade (Hutchinson, £25, Hatchards price £22.50) comes hard on the heels of last year’s New Yorker Book of the 40s; it’s a new compilation of stories and articles from the magazine featuring names that have since become legend: V S Pritchett, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Kenneth Tynan and John Above: one of the beautiful illustrations from The Fox and the Star Cheever. Philip Hamburger’s ‘The Perfect Glow’ – a profile of Oscar Hammerstein II – is a cracker. At the time of going to press, The New Yorker Book of the 60s: Story of a Decade (Hutchinson, £25, Hatchards price £22.50) wasn’t yet out – but it will be by Christmas. Why not make the two of them a hefty double act? Staying with the Fifties (and the Sixties and a bit of the Seventies), the wild success (well over a million sold) of the Ladybird Books for Grown-ups series – that spoofed the originals with titles such as The Mum and The Mid-life Crisis – is still on a roll. Its new line-up for ChristmasC includes suchs urgent contemporaryc themes asa The Sickie, The ZombieZ Apocalypse an and The Student (d (daringly decorated, fol following
recent outrages about cultural appropriation with young people wearing sombreros and wielding maracas). An illustration in The
Meeting shows a group of be-suited men talking seriously among themselves – and a woman taking the minutes. There’s even one called The
Cat if training one sounds too much like hard work (all Michael Joseph £6.99, Hatchards price £6.29).
There has to be a real cat book for Christmas. And in 2016 it’s the resolutely not quirky or cutesome The Trainable Cat: How to Make Life Happier for You and Your Cat by John Bradshaw and Sarah Ellis (Allen
Lane £20, Hatchards price £18). Cats being essentially solitary creatures, the authors are less concerned with training your moggy to jump through hoops than ensuring through behaviour and rewards that your pet is happy and unstressed and enjoys living with humans. Cats mustn’t steal all the glory over Christmas. The dogged type should get a look in too – and what better a modern guide than The Goodness of Dogs: The Human’s Guide to Choosing, Buying, Training, Feeding, Living With and Caring For Your Dog by India Knight (Penguin £14.99, Hatchards price £13.49). Following books about shopping, food, fashion and families, the Sunday Times columnist has discovered the allure of dogs. ‘I think I’m in love,’ she wrote three years ago when she bought her puppy, Brodie. ‘We are dog people, and it’s a complete joy.’ And this book, written with her usual wit and brio, is the result.
Any Ian Fleming fans out there? The Man with the Golden Typewriter (Bloomsbury £9.99, Hatchards £9) is a selection of letters (mostly to his publisher) from Fleming, chosen by his nephew, the writer Fergus Fleming. The golden typewriter title refers to the very one that Fleming Senior bought with the success of his novel Casino Royale. And the book is full of enjoyable anecdotes and some excellent jokes.
Hero of the Empire by Candice Millard (Allen Lane £20, Hatchards price £18) is a crackingly exciting read. It concerns Winston Churchill’s extraordinary escape from a Boer POW camp in Pretoria in 1899 – her contention being that this moment of heroism underpinned the rest of his political career. It is a portrait of individual courage and undaunted self-confidence – but also a wider picture of southern Africa on the cusp of the 20th century. It reads like a gripping escape novel. And for anyone interested in those, the grippingest escaper has to be Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household – now available (just in time for next year’s mooted appearance by Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role of a TV adaptation) as a Penguin Classic with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane, (£8.99, Hatchards price £8.09). This nailbiting (and compellingly neurotic) story of an anonymous hero going to ground in Dorset to escape a Nazi posing as a British officer on a shooting holiday is one of the most exciting novels of the last century. Curiocity: In Pursuit of London by Henry Eliot and Matt Lloyd-rose (Penguin, £30, Hatchards price £27) is a gem. A beautifully produced miscellany of fascinating facts about London, divided into sections enticingly entitled things like Skyscraping, Picturesque and Golgonooza. Wonderful illustrations are added to intriguing nuggets of information on a huge range of subjects from street cries to earthstars. An object of beauty in itself and the perfect present for the kind of person who might nurse a craving to know more about Wynkyn de Worde.
That person is quite possibly the same one who will enjoy The Joy of Quiz by Alan Connor (Particular Books £14.99, Hatchards price £13.49) a glorious romp through the kind of questions that make the pub-quizzer’s blood race. A light dusting of miscellaneous facts is the key to quiz mastery. And all-rounders triumph of course when it comes to quizzland and question setting – as Alan Connor points out: ‘Working out what people are likely to know about landmark TV isn’t the hard part. In pub quizzes and most TV shows, there’s an unspoken assumption that a keen physicist will have come across Jane Austen, while a lover of literature might know the names of Einstein, say, or Newton, but not a lot of what they got up to.” Anyone who has read Diana Henry’s cookery features in the Sunday Telegraph will know that she is a very safe pair of hands – and an excellent writer to boot. Her latest cookbook Simple: Effortless Food, Big Flavours (Mitchell Beazley £25, Hatchards price £22.50) is a must for the Christmas foodie. The thing is her recipes really work. Although the dishes in Simple are often deliciously exotic in origin, she rarely asks you to travel across the country for
‘This cat book is concerned with ensuring your pet is happy and enjoys living with humans’
an obscure ingredient, and she knows that real people sometimes buy things in tins. Elisabeth Luard needs no introduction to the longstanding Oldie reader. The recipes of the magazine’s brilliant cookery columnist are almost always inspired by an experience that she has had on her many travels. In Squirrel Pie (And Other Stories): Adventures in Food Across the Globe (Bloomsbury £16.99, Hatchards
price £15.29) she looks at her life through the recipes emerging from different landscapes: from the forests of Maine to the deserts of Gujarat via the islands of Crete and Sardinia and the rivers of central Europe. Luard has lived and eaten all over the world, digging out unusual dishes that can’t be found in restaurants or supermarkets. Squirrel pie, once popular all over America, she rediscovered in Maine – butchering a squirrel sounds unpleasant (there’s a pink gland to contend with) but Luard’s book is a great and lively pleasure.
For fruit-growers, why not add The Apple Orchard by Pete Brown (Allen Lane £16.99, Hatchards price £15.29) to the stocking pile. It’s a look at the orchards, their history and the ingenuity that has gone into cultivation over generations of hundreds of different kinds of apple – each with their own taste and application. A Tale of Two Families by Dodie Smith has been reprinted by the ever-reliable Hesperus Press (£8.99, Hatchards price £8.09) – a treasure trove of long-forgotten classics. For anyone who loved Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians or I Capture the Castle, this will go down a storm. Written (and set) in the 1970s, the novel concerns a middleaged couple, George and May: when May begins to tire of George’s many dalliances in the city, she moves the family to the country where he falls in love with his own sister-in-law. Just the book for a family Christmas – there’s even a cantankerous great aunt.