Books and Audio Books
Lucy Lethbridge’s selection for all ages
Book ideas for all the family, The working lives of the past look very different to us in the age of Zoom and online shopping. What a good time to revisit the utterly brilliant oral historian Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,
first published in 1974. Terkel talked to a wide range of workers, including miners, piano tuners, waitresses, grave diggers and that threatened species – office workers. The Folio Society has produced a deliciously beautiful new edition for £59.95.
Talking of the workplaces of long ago, what about a novel set in a 1930s department store, once a hive of human industry? Handheld Press’s attractive reprint of Business as
Usual (£12.99) by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford was the surprise hit of this strange summer. A particular pleasure of ordering from Handheld is that every book comes beautifully wrapped. Lovely.
The Second World War is still a reading winner, of abiding fascination – especially so perhaps in the Home-front atmosphere of lockdown. For anyone with a yen for adventure among the make-do-andmend set, Lissa Evans’s well-received new novel V for Victory (Doubleday, £14.99) is set in wartime Hampstead, in a lodging house where the landlady is not all she seems. Good news too that Wave Me Goodbye: Stories of the Second World War (edited by Anne Boston, £9.99), first published in 1988, has been reissued by Virago. Sicily ’43: The First Assault on Fortress Europe (Bantam Press, £25), James Holland’s readable new account of the largest seaborne landing in history, is a highlight of the autumn. It’s been a year of shenanigans in the Royal Family – and whispers of ‘vipers’ in the royal household. Wendy Holden’s acclaimed novel The Governess (£12.99, Welbeck Publishing) revisits the story of the first great modern betrayal – by Marion Crawford, ‘Crawfie’, the governess of Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. She wrote the story of her royal life and was cast forever into exile for it. Gruffalo fans, rejoice! Julia Donaldson’s Counting Creatures (Two Hoots, £11.99) has been illustrated beautifully by Sharon King-chai and is a fun compendium of peepholes and pull-outs for very young children. Richard Osman’s number one bestselling novel The Thursday Murder Club (Viking, £14.99) is set in a retirement village where the resident sleuths form a club to solve gruesome crimes. And everyone knows this is a field in which age and experience come out on top. There’s more inventive artwork on a numerical theme in historian and biographer Alexandra Harris’s fascinating look at the history of calendars and how we present the nature of time, by the always-interesting publishers, Little Toller. Time and Place: A Pocket Book on
the Art of Calendars is £12. Talking of calendars, Mary Berry once revealed to Graham Norton in a memorable interview that, every year, she bought a Cliff Richard one to hang in her kitchen. So doubtless
she’ll be one of the many enthusiasts who’ll be rushing to buy Cliff’s new autobiography The Dreamer (Ebury Press, £20), which is published at the end of October.
And for those in a mood for the 1960s, there are some evocative photographs of London fifty years ago in Lisa Tichner’s sumptuous new book from Yale University Press – London’s New Scene: Art and
Culture in the 1960s (£35). Or what about Blake Gopnik’s compendious biography of curiouser and curiouser Andy Warhol – Warhol: A Life as Art (Allen Lane, £35) which was hailed by none other than Elton John as revealing ‘the man and the genius under the silver wig’? Raynor Winn’s first book, The Salt
Path (Michael Joseph, £9.99), an account of how she and her husband set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path in the face of terminal illness, homelessness and bankruptcy, was a huge bestseller. Her second book The Wild Silence (Michael Joseph, £14.99) finds the couple back in Cornwall where they embark on a rewilding project. It has ‘luminous conviction’, said the Observer.
Rose Macaulay was another who wrote her way out of some personal tragedies. Handheld have reprinted her bracingly unsentimental collection, Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (£12.99), and Macaulay fans will also enjoy her biographer Sarah Lefanu’s journal of her research into her subject: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal (Handheld, £13.99). Teacher Kate Clanchy has won this year’s Orwell Prize for her extraordinary work helping children make remarkable poetry. She follows her acclaimed book, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (Picador, £6.99), with a guide to writing poetry for everyone. How to Grow Your Own Poem (Picador, £14.99). Anyone can do it. Dara Mcanulty wrote Diary of a Young Naturalist
(Little Toller, £16) when he was a 15-yearold schoolboy in Northern Ireland. It is a moving and vivid account of his obsession with nature. He writes, ‘This diary chronicles the turning of my world from spring to winter, at home, in the wild, in my head.’ It deservedly won the Wainwright Prize.
Everyone’s talking about mushrooms. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Bodley Head, £20) is a dazzling scientific account but also an adventure into the deep unknown. Robert Macfarlane was blown away – ‘dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing’.
I love memoirs about the solace of reading and the latest in a fairly well-stocked genre, Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Picador, £12.99), looks like a cracker. ‘Reading has saved my life, again and again, and has held my hand through every difficult time’, writes Rentzenbrink, a former bookseller and author of The Last Act of Love (Picador, £3.99), a moving book on the death of her brother. As for cookbooks, this year’s biggest surprise hit was Falastin (Ebury Press, £28), a book of Palestinian food by Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley. Lots of delicious-looking mezze in here – with some surprising takes on Middle-eastern classics like hummus. And who wouldn’t want to try a sesame crumble? Recommended. Now that lockdown has unleashed so many urban gardeners, Grow Fruit & Vegetables in Pots (Phaidon, £24.95) is a valuable addition to the kitchen bookshelf. It’s from the kitchen-garden stable of Aaron Bertelsen of Great Dixter and is gloriously, enticingly illustrated. Guaranteed to inspire. Quoted prices are subject to change.