Non-Fiction

The Importance of Music to Girls
By Lavinia Greenlaw

When the poet Lavinia Greenlaw thinks back to her past, she hears music. Not just Chopin - though she hears him, too - but David Cassidy and the Osmonds, boys "who clearly knew how to handle a blow-dryer" and the scream idols of all young girls in the early 1970s. As she gets older, she moves on to Dylan and then to punk to go with her tight, straight jeans and hair-with-attitude. The background against which the young Greenlaw was swapping musical styles and learning about adolescent mating rituals was the quirky and sometimes fractious family home: doctor parents, with her mother hosting a madrigal group in the sitting room. Greenlaw, as you would hope from a poet, is an exceptionally elegant writer who captures the small shifts and moods of her life with precision. Not a lot happens, but the small increments of maturing are common to all of us, whatever the soundtrack we set them to.

Faber, £15.99
To buy this book

---

The Perilous Crown: Ruling France 1814-1848
By Munro Price

The received wisdom about early 19th-century France is that with the fall of Napoleon, the country's glory days came to an abrupt halt. The swagger of 'le petit caporal' was followed by the stolidity of the Restoration - the corpulent and bathetic Louis XVIII, the viciously reactionary Charles X and the bourgeois-minded Louis-Philippe. Munro Price, however, has breathed new life into the period between the first fall of Napoleon and the overthrow of the monarchy in 1848. In his hands, it is a period rich in politicking and wider cultural shifts, the growth of industrial capitalism and a nascent parliamentary democracy among them. His central figure is Louis-Philippe, who survived the Revolutionary period and waited a long time to take the throne, overthrowing Charles X in 1830. Price mixes biography and political history with a sure hand, and though his cast list is far from glamorous, he shows that the post-imperial period was a far from sedate one.

Macmillan, £20
To buy this book

 

 

Eating the Sun
By Oliver Morton

Oliver Morton's fluent book fathoms the most unobserved but necessary of all Nature's mechanisms - photosynthesis, the manufacture of life from light. The more you think about it, the more miraculous it seems: plants take sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and produce oxygen from them. So no plants, no planet. Morton does not just look at the biology and chemistry of photosynthesis, but at the men who discovered how it worked and how we need to manage the carbon cycle to survive in the world we have altered. The heroes of his story include Martin Kamen (who did key work on carbon), Robin Hill (biochemistry), Robert Emerson (light) and Jim Barber (bacteria); it was these men who, little by little, worked their way to the heart of photosynthesis. Morton is an exemplary science writer, characterised by lucidity and a strong linked narrative. Some of the book is testing to non-scientists, but stick with it: his conclusions are clarity itself.

Fourth Estate, £25
To buy this book

---

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad
By John Stape

When 21-year-old Joseph Conrad arrived in England in 1878, he spoke no English but was already rich in life experience. By the age of 11 he had suffered exile in Russia, lost both his parents and shortly afterwards conceived a "great passion" for the sea; subsequently he spent 16 years in the British Merchant Navy, voyaging as far as Sumatra and the Congo. His novels, when he came to write them, did not lack for material. John Stape's biography is a fluent retelling of the external facts of Conrad's life, but he falters when it comes to the novelist's inner existence. All those lonely, isolated, self-contained heroes - where did they come from? Stape doesn't say. Conrad himself described "long fits of depression" but, despite the fact that they can be felt in the books, Stape brushes them off. For all the thoroughness of the research, this is a biography curiously lacking in empathy.
Heinemann, £20
To buy this book