skip to nav

 

Non-Fiction

Thames: Sacred River
By Peter Ackroyd

Due to the summer's rains the source of the Thames has apparently moved some 20 miles further west from its previous starting point in Oxfordshire. This snippet came too late to be included in Peter Ackroyd's great riverine compendium but it is just the sort of quirky fact that he likes. He likes grandiosity, too: his Thames may be a highway of commerce but it is also a mythical waterway. It is, he says, our Ganges, Nile and Euphrates, a stream that is in our national bloodstream. Ackroyd travels the Thames from top to tail describing both the changing landscape it flows through – from meadow via city to estuary – and the history that happened along its banks. It's a mixture of macro and micro at which Ackroyd is particularly adept, and while this book has some of the bagginess that has crept into his more recent work, its meandering course fits its subject.

Chatto & Windus, £25
To buy this book

You'll Win Nothing With Kids
By Jim White

Jim White is an acerbic and droll sports commentator for The Daily Telegraph, a man who has seen enough financial chicanery, posturing and downright criminality to have become immune to the gimcrack allure of professional sport. But he's an object lesson in how, in devotees, the flame of games playing can never be properly extinguished. This book recounts his involvement with Northmeadow Youth - his son's football team and the object of White's hopes, dreams and desires. From soccer dad, White progresses to manager (unsuccessful) and he describes every failure – of which there are many – with a tart mix of humour and sharp observation. He knows he shouldn't shout at his hapless charges – but he does; he knows the result of a kickabout between kids shouldn't matter – but it does. It is this subliminal fight against his own emotions that gives this book its energy and its unexpected poignancy.

Little Brown, £12.99
To buy this book


pic

 

Other Colours
By Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel laureate and Turkey's most celebrated – and persecuted – writer, has here produced an omnium gatherum to keep himself and his devotees ticking over until the next major work appears. Other Colours contains a selection of essays, an interview, a short story and the transcript of his Nobel acceptance speech. It offers, therefore, a selection of entrances into the writer's mind. Pieces on the literary heroes of his youth that shaped him (Camus, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Nabokov) are interspersed with reflections on Istanbul, the city he was born in and a place he feels he couldn't leave even if he wanted to. Pamuk's is a distinctive voice – a foreign timbre with a European sensibility. Like his city, he bridges East and West, sometimes uncomfortably: it was, after all, Turkey that put him on trial for his temerity in discussing the Armenian genocide of 1915, and it was Western pressure that got him released.
Faber, £20
To buy this book

.

The Fall-Out
By Andrew Anthony

Something is happening on the literate liberal-left: Nick Cohen, its poster boy, has recently turned on his own kind with What's Left, and now Andrew Anthony has followed suit. A journalist for the Guardian and the Observer who had been to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas, he was shocked into rethinking long cherished attitudes by the aftermath of 9/11, and this is his account of the process. While his peers seemed to think that America had it coming, Anthony wasn't so sure and asked the unaskable: were there worse evils in the world than America? He went to the likes of Christopher Hitchens, George Galloway and Michael Moore for (noisy) answers, his quest driven along by the murder of Theo van Gogh, 7/7 and, of course, the Iraq war. And, like a supertanker turning, Anthony himself gradually changed direction. This is an exceptionally thoughtful analysis of how sections of the West have fostered the ills that now besiege it.

Jonathan Cape, £14.99
To buy this book

Fiction

Exit Music
By Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin's curmudgeonly Edinburgh detective, John Rebus, has, over the course of 17 books, been presented to us in real time. He has aged – if not mellowed – in front of the reader's eyes. In Exit Music, he's now on the cusp of 60 and only 10 days away from retirement. This being Rebus, however, - ie, a man who looks for trouble if it doesn't find him first - there's still time for a corpse or two before the pipe and slippers. A dissident Russian poet is found with his head staved in, and a sound engineer who taped one of his readings is incinerated. There's Rebus's arch enemy, Ger Cafferty, in the mix too, as well as the DI's obligatory head to heads with authority. Rankin keeps it all bubbling nicely, fanned by an elegiac breeze. This should, in theory, be Rebus's last case, but Rankin is too wily not to leave the door open a crack.

Orion, £18.99

To buy this book

 

The Carhullan Army
By Sarah Hall

There's something comforting about sci-fi set in Cumbria. Previously, the Booker short-listed Sarah Hall (The Electric Michelangelo) has based her fiction in the 20th century North West, but, even in an unspecified future when epidemics and ecological and economic implosion have fractured the world, she can't escape the fells. Carhullan is a remote community of women who struggle against The Authority, the stern male group that rules a country in chaos. The women have their own matriarch, Jackie, and unity gives them strength; but is it enough to keep them safe from violence? The story is narrated by Sister, a woman who finds that Jackie and her charges are preparing for war. Hall's is a particularly spare dystopia in which redemption and love are not options. This makes the novel an uncomfortable read but also a powerful one.

Faber, £14.99
To buy this book

Picture this

The French Century: An Illustrated History of Modern France by Brian Moynahan

However much we nervously try to ward off Gallic influence by making mock of our neighbours - lack of cleanliness, excess of pretention et al - the French have successfully infiltrated our way of life. Without the literature of Proust, the music of Debussy, the glamour of couture fashion, classic films like Belle de Jour (above) or indeed, a croissant in the morning, our culture would be sadly lacking. True to its title, this book chronicles the many legacies of France over the past century, its lengthy text accompanied by an exhaustive (and entrancing) archive of images documenting everything from peasants and protests to film stars and football. It's a history, sociology and cultural lesson rolled into one, and Moynahan is a suitably authoritative teacher on a country he occasionally finds infuriating, but clearly admires.

Flammarion £19.95
To buy this book

Paperbacks

The Looming Tower

This is Lawrence Wright's definitive account of the rise and embitterment of al-Qaeda. The path to 9/11 led from religious opposition groups in Egypt and Saudi Arabia by way of anti-Russian fighting in Afghanistan. Wright chronicles it meticulously.
Penguin, £8.99
To buy this book


.

Cockeyed

Ryan Knighton's most memorable 18th birthday present was the diagnosis that he was rapidly and incurably becoming blind. His memoir does not dwell on the metaphorical darkness but lights up the literal darkness without self pity and with numerous self-deprecating insights.
Atlantic, £8.99
To buy this book

 

.

The Uninvited

Dan Dong is penniless and hungry and fills his stomach by posing as a journalist and attending corporate banquets. It is at these feasts that he meets dodgy businessmen and their even dodgier acolytes. Geling Yan's novel is about modern China as much as Dong.
Faber, £7.99
To buy this book

 

The Oyster House Siege

When a 1983 robbery goes wrong the criminals hole up in a restaurant, holding staff and customers hostage. One of the gunmen is a would-be chef, the other a psychopath. Restaurant critic Jay Rayner's crime caper is diverting, but such a good scenario deserves better.
Atlantic, £7.99
To buy this book