Paperbacks

‘Jasper Winn’s Water Ways [Profile, 384pp, £10.99] is an engaging account of the history and people who have worked and lived on British canals, and testimony to their evolving nature,’ wrote Douglas Field in the TLS. ‘He points out that whereas once “canals were key to the economies and innovations of centralised industries”, today they are “wildlife corridors . . . in a sense, a 2,000-mile-long (if very narrow) national park”.’ Winn, explained PD Smith in the Guardian, ‘spent a year on towpaths and waterways, travelling by foot, bicycle and, of course, narrowboat’. And Olivia Edwards in Geographical confirmed that Water Ways is ‘more than a charming travel book, this is a roving miscellanea of engrossing canal facts and lore’.

Laura Purcell’s Bone China (Raven, 448pp, £7.99) is billed as a ‘Du Maurier-esque chiller’, which may be putting it mildly, according to Paraic O’donnell in the Guardian. In the Times, Antonia Senior set the scene: ‘Hester Why is the new personal maid to Miss Pinecroft, the weird old lady of the house who sits unmoving in a freezing room that houses a bone china dinner service.’ The story then ‘jumps backwards to Miss Pinecroft’s youth’, when she and her doctor father first moved to Cornwall. ‘Purcell has a sure storytelling touch, a command of atmosphere and a keen eye for the telling details of social history,’ wrote O’donnell. And Senior confirmed that the novel ‘builds to a suitably creepy and gothic finale’.

Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945

(Penguin, 304pp, £9.99) is the little-told story of the wave of suicides carried out in the war’s closing period by thousands of ‘ordinary’ Germans as well as those at the top of the Nazi leadership. ‘The exact number of suicides is incalculable, but through gruesome examples, Huber conveys the enormity of the dreadful phenomenon,’ wrote Ruta Sepetys in the FT. ‘Huber tells the shocking stories’ with ‘literary power and skill, making excellent use of unknown material’, confirmed Richard J Evans in the Guardian.