Come dancers: The castof very bestreads of the year
My 2018 favourite book is One Enchanted Evening by my Strictly Come Dancing partner Anton Du Beke. It is Anton’s first novel and it’s a belter. The book is set in the 1930s in a fictitious upmarket hotel. Of course the hotel has a magnificent Grand Ballroom where the principal dancer is the debonair Raymond Du Guise. Remind you of anyone? The characters and stories are beautifully interwoven to provide a really fabulous read. Black Camp 21 is a war-time thriller seen through the eyes of exiled German prisoners of war in snowy Perthshire as they plan their escape. It is an unusual twist on a well-known genre. Escape narratives are almost always seen from the perspective of the allies. The book is by the television producer Bill Jones and it has all the elements to become a film. I grew up near the prison camp near Cultybraggan by Comrie where the books is set and never imagined it would become such an evocative and tense setting. The Tattooist Of Auschwitz by Heather Morris had me in tears. This was the first of many raw emotional reactions to one of the most harrowing books I have ever read – and one that will stay with me for a very long time. Although it is a book about the horrors of what happened at places like Auschwitz it is also about love. I got utterly lost in this book. I studied the World War II at University and it has always fascinated me – it was one of humanity’s darkest hours and we need to remember it. I hugely enjoyed ES Thomson’s The Blood, the third in her mesmerising series of historical crime novels set in London in the middle of the 19th Century. As a fanatical devotee of Dickens, I love that Victorian period, and Elaine Thomson evokes the sights and the smells of the seedy dockland area brilliantly. Her protagonist Jem Flockhart is an inspired invention – a female apothecary disguised as a man, whose life and loves are as complex a secret as the cases she investigates. The social detail is fabulous. I got How to Love A Jamaican out of my local Bishopbriggs Library. The librarian told me that three libraries in East Dunbartonshire are under threat which saddened me. This collection is full of tender, true and transformative stories that explore what it means to belong. The author tells the stories of Jamaicans who have lived at home, and ones who have settled abroad. The stories shine with life and are full of surprises. Alexia Arthurs is a young writer to watch.