Fiction
Compiled by Angel Gurría-Quintana
2666
By Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Picador £20, 912 pages
Hailed as a masterpiece, the late Bolaño’s sprawling and ambitious work mixes the story of three literary critics seeking an elusive German writer in the Mexican desert with an account of the horrifying murders of scores of young women in a border town.
The Women
By TC Boyle
Bloomsbury £12.99, 464 pages
Boyle directs his raw satirical powers at a flawed, egocentric manipulator: architect Frank Lloyd Wright. As the title suggests, this novel focuses less on his architecture than on the women he mistreated.
The Children’s Book
By AS Byatt
Chatto & Windus £18.99, 624 pages
Her dissatisfaction with modern children’s fiction spurred Byatt into writing this novel. At the turn of the century, with the first world war looming, a loosely knit group of Fabians and libertarians pour their utopian ambitions into idealised visions of childhood that obscure the complexity of their own entanglements.
The Immortals
By Amit Chaudhuri
Picador £16.99, 416 pages
“You cannot practise art on an empty stomach,” says Shyamji, a music teacher striking a compromise between his talent for classical Indian music and his need to make a living. The novel’s most impressive character is Bombay itself, growing voraciously as its middle class expands.
Turbulence
By Giles Foden
Faber £16.99, 368 pages
Foden’s entertaining fictionalisation of the transatlantic rush to make “the most important weather forecast in history” on D-Day. A gripping read, much of it based on actual events.
Sunnyside
By Glen David Gold
Sceptre £17.99, 576 pages
Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil, delves into Hollywood’s heyday, when films were considered a form of magic and film stars were earthly gods. No star was bigger than Charlie Chaplin, whose loneliness, insecurity and jealousy are vividly rendered.
The Lieutenant
By Kate Grenville
Canongate £12.99, 302 pages
Orange Prize-winner Grenville offers a satisfying historical novel about a reluctant naval officer whose passion is astronomy but who finds himself recruited for an expedition to the future penal colony of New South Wales.
This is How
By MJ Hyland
Canongate £12.99, 320 pages
The Australian author’s novel Carry Me Down was nominated for the Man Booker. Her latest book introduces Patrick Oxtoby, an outsider driven to extreme violence by feelings he cannot fathom. Hyland’s exquisitely crafted prose makes readers care for this emotionally disjointed protagonist.
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber £14.99, 240 pages
Ishiguro presents an assortment of melancholy and unfulfilled characters whose lives are connected to music – an ageing American crooner, an untried cello virtuoso, a guitarist in a street-band and an insecure saxophonist. The author’s trademark subtlety and restraint are well served by his first venture into the short form.
One More Year
By Sana Krasikov
Portobello £10.99, 256 pages
This auspicious debut by Ukrainian-born Krasikov includes some widely praised stories that previously appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Krasikov’s eight tales of immigration and cultural adjustment reveal a fine eye for the significant details of daily life, conveyed in unadorned but powerful prose.
The Vagrants
By Yiyun Li
Fourth Estate £12.99, 352 pages
Chinese-born Yiyun Li won acclaim for her stories about immigrants to the US. The Vagrants, her first novel, is set in a fictional Chinese town during the period of mild political liberalisation that followed Mao’s death. She depicts the aftermath of the execution of a woman accused of “counter-revolutionary” activities.
The Kindly Ones
By Jonathan Littell
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Chatto & Windus £20, 992 pages
Littell, an American, wrote this brutal Holocaust novel in French, and was awarded the Prix Goncourt, the highest accolade for French language literature. Grimly relentless in its depiction of evil, this fictional memoir of a death camp “efficiency expert” is a chilling indictment of humanity’s capacity to justify cruelty.
Wolf Hall
By Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate £18.99, 672 pages
This exercise in historical imagination produces a convincing portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, but avoids most of the clichés that plague period fiction. Mantel’s Cromwell is an astute, worldly fixer with a post-feudal outlook.
The Winter Vault
By Anne Michaels
Bloomsbury £16.99, 352 pages
Anxiously awaited by readers of Fugitive Pieces, Michaels’ award-winning debut, her follow-up is a tender meditation on loss and authenticity. Moving between Egypt, Canada and Poland, the novel’s protagonists are rapt with the task of salvaging lives, buildings and memories.
The Thing Around Your Neck
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fourth Estate £14.99, 300 pages
After the success of her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, Nigerian author Adichie has concentrated on the short form to great effect. Her 12 stories cast a sympathetic eye on the plight of Nigerians hoping to move abroad, as well as those struggling to adjust to the immigrant’s life.
Occupied City
By David Peace
Faber £14.99, 288 pages
Part two of Peace’s “Tokyo Trilogy”, this unsettling novel re-imagines the Teikoku Bank murders of 1948, in which an unidentified man poisoned 16 people in broad daylight by pretending to be a sanitation officer and persuading victims to drink a deadly drug.
Lark & Termite
By Jayne Anne Phillips
Jonathan Cape £16.99, 272 pages
Lark, a precociously wise 12-year-old, cares for her disabled half-brother, Termite, in the small West Virginian town of Winfield. Their story is interspersed with scenes from the final hours of Corporal Robert Leavitt, a US soldier in the Korean war, killed by his own side during the No Gun Ri massacre.
Burnt Shadows
By Kamila Shamsie
Bloomsbury £14.99, 384 pages
An astonishing story of love and survival set against historical moments – from Nagasaki in 1945 and Indian partition in 1947, to the events of 2001 and the war in Afghanistan.
Brooklyn
By Colm Tóibín
Viking £17.99, 256 pages
Eilis Lacey leaves behind her quiet life in County Wexford and travels to Brooklyn in search of better opportunities, in Tóibín’s sixth novel. The author’s measured prose, and his capacity for observing emotional nuance, spare this book from sentimentality.
Cutting for Stone
By Abraham Verghese
Chatto & Windus £17.99, 560 pages
Verghese, a surgeon with two non-fiction books about his medical experiences to his credit, has produced an epic novel about conjoined Ethiopian twins who, even after their surgical separation, continue to share their passions.
The Little Stranger
By Sarah Waters
Virago £16.99, 512 pages
Part ghost story, part social history of postwar Britain, Waters’ fifth novel is a departure from her lesbian Victorian bodice-rippers that were so successfully adapted for television. A treat for fans of the gothic and ghoulish as well as those with an interest in the upturned landscape of the late 1940s.
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Teen Fiction
Compiled by James Lovegrove 
Genesis
By Bernard Beckett
Quercus £10, 208 pages
Genesisstrikes a happy medium between novel-of-ideas and beguiling narrative. Set in a post-apocalyptic utopia, where a young girl is undergoing an important examination, it’s an intricate enquiry into the nature of human consciousness and artificial intelligence.
Ausländer
By Paul Dowswell
Bloomsbury £10.99, 304 pages
During the second world war, Polish orphan Piotr is taken from his homeland and housed with the family of a German eugenicist, from whom he must keep secret his pro-Jewish activities – and his true racial heritage. Ausländer
ranks among the very best of wartime historical fiction.
Torn Pages
By Sally Grindley
Bloomsbury £5.99, 224 pages
Three African siblings orphaned by Aids must contend with the struggles of day-to-day living and the prejudice and superstition that surround them as a result of the disease. An “issues” novel without moralising or didacticism.
Crossing the Line
By Gillian Philip
Bloomsbury £6.99, 288 pages
Philip’s gut-punch of a book plants the reader inside the mind of a teenage bully boy and makes him sympathetic and almost likable. Seldom has the Darwinian world of the adolescent been more brutally laid bare.
Malice
By Chris Wooding
Scholastic £6.99, 384 pages
A comic book called Malice literally draws readers in to the nightmarish world it depicts and won’t let them out again. Told partly in comic-strip form, the novel really takes flight when Wooding opens the gates of his imagination and all manner of faceless beings, bizarre clockwork creatures and enormous steam-powered machines come out.
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Children’s books
Compiled by Neville Hawcock
One True Bear
By Ted Dewan
Orchard £10.99, 32 pages
Ted Dewan’s story of how a plucky teddy wins the affection of a troubled boy will appeal to children of three and up, and to sentimentally inclined adults. Real boys’ drawings add an unusual touch.
Hattie the Bad
By Jane Devlin and Joe Berger
Puffin £5.99, 32 pages
Hattie is not bad in a wimpy “forgot-to-tidy-her-room” kind of way. No, she’s “really, really bad”. One day she resolves to be good – but finds it’s no way to win friends. Yes, this wittily illustrated book bears a deeply dodgy message: no wonder children of three and up enjoy it.
Portable Ghosts
By Margaret Mahy
Faber £5.99, 160 pages
“Are you a ghost?” Ditta asks the mysterious boy she keeps seeing in a shadowy corner of the school library. He is, of course – and with his help, resourceful Ditta goes on to tackle a far more troublesome haunting. For readers of eight or nine and up.
Uncle
By JP Martin
New York Review £9.99, 224 pages
Reprint of the year. Uncle is a rich, pompous elephant who lives in a skyscraper city called Homeland and is always being incompetently schemed against by the wastrel crowd in nearby Badfort. A kind of slapstick “Gormenghast” for children of eight and up, this is a very funny book.
Crocodiles are the Best Animals of All!
By Sean Taylor
Frances Lincoln £11.99, 32 pages
Whatever any other animal can do, Crocodile can do better, whether it’s swinging through the trees or climbing a mountain. But laid-back Donkey knows how to get the better of this show-off ... Children of three and up will love it.
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Business
Compiled by Stefan Stern
Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression – and the Bankers Who Broke the World
By Liaquat Ahamed
William Heinemann £20, 576 pages
A former World Bank economist, Ahamed revisits the great crash of 1929 and details how the work of revered central bankers led to disaster. A salutary warning from the past about the unexpected consequences of policy mistakes at the highest level. Historical but topical.
Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters For Global Capitalism
By George Akerlof and Robert Shiller
Princeton University Press £14.95, 264 pages
Behavioural economics, once regarded with deep suspicion, is winning more advocates. Akerlof is a Nobel laureate while Shiller teaches at Yale. Its title echoes Keynes, while its analysis forces readers to consider how irrational human behaviour impinges on neat economic models.
Chasing Alpha: How Reckless Growth and Unchecked Ambition Ruined the City’s Golden Decade
By Philip Augar
Bodley Head £20, 272 pages
A colourful account of the financial roller coaster ride by a former banker. What really happened at Northern Rock, Royal Bank of Scotland et al? It’s all here.
False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World
By Alan Beattie
Viking £20, 336 pages
The FT’s world trade editor reveals why some economies flourish while others fail, even when they appear to be equally blessed with natural resources and opportunities to prosper. A commentary on the often mysterious world of global economic mega-trends.
House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism
By William Cohan
Allen Lane £25, 480 pages
A former investment banker, and an FT /Goldman Sachs award-winning author, Cohan turns his attention to the collapse of the US investment bank Bear Stearns. Greed, incompetence and dishonesty all make starring appearances.
How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
By Jim Collins
Random House Business Books £15.99, 240 pages
The author who told us how companies can go “from good to great” now explains how they can sink from great to dead. A crisp, timely description of the fate that lies in store for any organisation that takes its success for granted and loses the ability to adapt to changed circumstances.
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
By Dambisa Moyo
Allen Lane £14.99, 208 pages
A sustained and passionate attack on the unthinking aid culture – a process by which, critics say, poor people in rich countries give money to rich people in poor countries. Moyo is an investment banker based in London and a former World Bank employee. She argues that aid feeds corruption and crowds out good investment.
Glow: How You Can Radiate Energy, Innovation and Success
By Lynda Gratton
FT/Prentice Hall £14.99, 248 pages
A rare foray into the personal development section of the business bookshelves, Gratton’s vibrant text challenges readers to get out from under the tedium of the daily grind and look to form creative relationships at work instead. Her research confirms that good things happen to positive people.
Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science
By Charles Jacobs
Portfolio £18.99, 224 pages
Genetically we are 98 per cent chimpanzee, the author tells us. No wonder that unnatural and inhuman management practices, as favoured by many employers, simply do not work. A startling account of how much management needs to change to be effective.
The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century
By Frank Partnoy
Profile Business £18.99, 288 pages
Partnoy vividly recreates the turbulent Wall Street of the 1920s to tell the story of the Swedish magnate whose death precipitated the “Kreuger crash” of 1932. A powerful reminder that today’s scandals had vast and destructive predecessors.
Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe
By Gillian Tett
Little, Brown £18.99, 352 pages
The FT’s capital markets editor uncovers the origins of the collapse of global financial markets. Tells for the first time in detail how the whizz kids of the credit derivatives markets created a monster that ended up devouring them.
The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
By Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Allen Lane £20, 352 pages
Two distinguished academics explain how consumerism and gross income inequality can harm general well-being. And this inequality seems to be bad news for rich and poor alike. The alternative? Collaboration and greater human kindness. A well-timed and exhaustively researched attack on the “greed is good” ethos.
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History
Compiled by George Pendle
When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
By Andy Beckett
Faber £20, 448 pages
Were the 1970s quite as bad as we remember them? Only in part, suggests Beckett, who argues that the miners’ strikes and the three-day week in Britain were responsible for a radical shift in both political and economic thinking. Even before Margaret Thatcher’s arrival, Britain was transforming itself from a nation of collectivists to one of individualists.
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy
By Antony Beevor
Viking £25, 608 pages
Beevor’s study of the last great invasion in European history distinguishes itself through his willingness to explore D-Day’s more controversial aspects. The thousands of French killed by Allied bombing, the uncertainty and infighting of the British and American generals, and the bravery of the German troops reveal a new side to an oft-told story.
The Rise and Fall of Communism
By Archie Brown
The Bodley Head £25, 736 pages
A comprehensive study by one of Britain’s foremost experts on communism is filled with incidents both sinister and grimly hilarious. Brown paints a persuasive picture of a peasant ideology that, no matter how economically inefficient and politically unpopular, could have lasted indefinitely without the help of reformers from within.
Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto
By Samuel Kassow
Allen Lane £10.99, 544 pages
Under the shadow of extermination in the Warsaw ghetto, a secret archive of Jewish life was created. Buried in milk churns and soldered tin boxes, it consisted not only of witness reports but also the ephemera of life – sweet wrappers, tram tickets, ration cards. Kassow’s book illuminates the human urge to leave behind a history.
America, Empire of Liberty: A New History
By David Reynolds
Allen Lane £30, 704 pages
The discord between ideals and reality are the foundation of Reynolds’ sweeping study of America. The identity crisis engendered by being an empire forged by anti-imperialists, a land of liberty fuelled by slavery, and a secular state energised by godly ambition, is never more evident to Reynolds than in the two Bush presidencies.
Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary
By Miri Rubin
Allen Lane £30, 540 pages
Jewish girl makes good, or rather God, in this highly original book that charts the veneration of Mary over 2,000 years. A slender scriptural presence – she appears more often in the Koran than the Gospels – Rubin describes how Mary became a protean presence, affixing herself to myriad cultures.
After Mandela: The Battle for the Soul of South Africa
By Alec Russell
Hutchinson £18.99, 336 pages
Mingling hope and despair, Russell, the FT’s world news editor, charts the course of South Africa’s “second struggle” as the country built on the foundation of Nelson Mandela’s visionary leadership. Focusing on the former president Thabo Mbeki and his successor Jacob Zuma, the country teeters between Eden and Sodom.
Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life
By Timothy Ryback
Bodley Head £18.99, 320 pages
Charting Hitler’s intellectual growth through the books he owned, Ryback shows that while Hitler flirted with the ideas of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, his own theories were “cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers”.
The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England
By Keith Thomas
OUP £20, 384 pages
From one of England’s greatest historians comes a stately study of what gave our ancestors’ lives meaning. Military prowess, work, wealth, reputation, friendship and fame were all important, Thomas shows. His discussion of the way in which acquisition became an ideology, as opposed to an insult, unites the past and present.
Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen
By Anna Whitelock
Bloomsbury £20, 384 pages
Being a half-sibling of Elizabeth I invited invidious comparisons and Mary has often been blamed for much of the violence that wracked England in the Tudor period. Whitelock reassesses her achievements, particularly her attempts to promote religious tolerance, as well as her groundbreaking work in getting parliament to take a woman seriously.
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Politics and religion
Compiled by Lewis Jones
Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity
By Carla Del Ponte with Chuck Sudetic
Other Press $25.95, 448 pages
Carla Del Ponte’s memoir of her stints as chief prosecutor of war criminals in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia is inspired by fury. Her themes are the tension between the pursuit of crime and political prudence, and the need to dispense more than victors’ justice. An important book.
Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings
By John Gray
Allen Lane £20, 496 pages
In this selection of John Gray’s writings over three decades, the former London School of Economics professor takes a bracing approach to the delusions of global capitalism and the pieties of liberal internationalism. He has a melancholy but realistic sense of human limitations.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Penguin £10.99, 928 pages
In her contribution to the slew of books about Abraham Lincoln in this 200th anniversary year, Kearns Goodwin, a biographer of many presidents, concentrates on the political machinations of Lincoln and those around him.
God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World
By John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Allen Lane $25, 352 pages
In their latest book, the Economist’s editor-in-chief and US editors seek to address liberal incomprehension of the religious beliefs that animate hundreds of millions of people. Their focus is on Christianity with an American accent and its harnessing of modernity.
Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories
By Azar Nafisi
William Heinemann £17.99, 368 pages
Nafisi’s beautifully written memoir of life in the Islamic Republic gives context to current events. As a child of the shah’s ruling class, she longed for revolution but was dismayed by its outcome. She has much to teach both sides.
Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century
By Nandan Nilekani
Allen Lane £25, 416 pages
A founder of Infosys, an IT outsourcing company, Nilekani argues that Indians are now comfortable with globalisation and is optimistic that India can return to the dominant position it held in the world economy before the 18th century.
Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief
By John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale
Westminster/John Knox Press £11.99, 160 pages
For several years physicist and Anglican priest Polkinghorne and his former
pupil Beale have answered questions on their website about the relationship between religion and science. This is a probing selection.
Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: What the Price of Oil Means for the Way We Live
By Jeff Rubin
Virgin £18.99, 304 pages
Economist Rubin engages with the fractious debate about peak oil. As oil supplies dwindle, the global economy will change profoundly, and probably painfully – but the new world may be preferable to the old one.
What Price Liberty?: How Freedom Was Won and is Being Lost
By Ben Wilson
Faber £14.99, 480 pages
Wilson argues that the erosion of Britain’s liberties began with the two world wars and has accelerated under New Labour, with its Orwellian Asbos, computer databases and CCTV cameras. A true libertarian, Wilson argues that the British would do well to learn the American line, that “Freedom isn’t free”.
It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower
By Michela Wrong
Fourth Estate £12.99, 368 pages
The eponymous whistleblower is John Githongo, who spent two years as Kenya’s anti-corruption tsar before fleeing to exile in London after threats against his life. Wrong’s book is part political thriller, part African morality tale, and also shows the weakness of western and financial institutions working in Kenya.
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Sport
Compiled by Simon Kuper
The Last Champion: The Life of Fred Perry
By Jon Henderson
Yellow Jersey Press £18.99, 304 pages
Perry may forever remain the last British man to win Wimbledon (in 1936) but he did so much else besides. He was world table tennis champion, serial romancer of Hollywood actresses, founder of a clothing brand and a rebel.
Born To Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
By Christopher McDougall
Profile £16.99, 304 pages
Born To Run
argues that humans are “born to run”. After man first stood erect, posits McDougall, he probably survived by running animals to death.
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Travel
Compiled by Harry Eyres
Islands: A Trip Through Time and Space
By Peter Conrad
Thames & Hudson £14.95, 192 pages
Islands are usually seen as idyllic retreats, but in Conrad’s view they can be prisons. But then, the Tasmanian author’s islands are more mental constructions than physical entities. This erudite, melancholy tour of islands in our culture is wide-ranging and beautifully written.
Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey into the Soul of Britain
By Matthew Engel
Macmillan £14.99, 336 pages
Part travelogue, part history, this is the work of a train lover driven to distraction by Britain’s uniquely exasperating rail network. FT writer Engel will make you laugh and gnash your teeth.
The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica
By Ian Thomson
Faber £14.99, 384 pages
One of the best travel books of the past few years, Thomson’s sombre narrative is an unsparing evocation of an island often closer to hell than paradise.
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Science
Compiled by Clive Cookson
Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species
By Sean Carroll
Quercus £16.99, 240 pages
This year’s double Darwin anniversary, 200 years since Darwin’s birth and 150 since the publication of The Origin of Species, has inspired an extraordinary outpouring of books. Top genetics professor Carroll places Darwin as the first of a series of scientific investigators who travelled the world during the 19th and 20th centuries in search of biological inspiration. He also looks ahead at possible future developments in evolutionary theory, notably the “virtual certainty” of discovering life somewhere else in the universe.
Experimental Man: What One Man’s Body Says About His Future, Your Health, and Our Toxic World
By David Ewing Duncan
Wiley £17.99, 370 pages
No previous author has undergone such an extensive battery of health tests as Duncan. He puts every aspect of his biological make-up under the microscope and, in the process, gives us a brilliant view of what cutting-edge medical technology can – and cannot – tell us about our future health.
Seasons of Life: The Biological Rhythms That Living Things Need to Thrive and Survive
By Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman
Profile Books £20, 320 pages
Everyone knows about the circadian clock that controls the daily rhythms of life. Foster and Kreitzman focus on the less familiar circannual clock, which controls the responses of living creatures to seasonal changes. Interactions between clock and outside world tell animals when to mate, migrate or hibernate – and plants when to grow and shed leaves.
Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England
By Steve Jones
Little, Brown £20, 320 pages
Jones, genetics professor at University College London, draws out beautifully the rich material in Darwin’s lesser-known natural history books and shows what an indefatigable traveller he was, criss-crossing the British Isles in an endless search for specimens.
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World
By Eugenie Samuel Reich
Palgrave Macmillan £15.99, 272 pages
A brilliant case study of research fraud, Reich describes how Jan Hendrik Schön, a wunderkind of physics at the famous Bell Labs in New Jersey, hoodwinkedcolleagues and scientific journals by fabricating data for four years until the deception was uncovered in 2002. One secret to his fraudulence: being extraordinarily friendly with everyone.
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Food and drink
Compiled by Harry Eyres
How to Drink
By Victoria Moore
Granta £15.99, 338 pages
You might think drinking is one thing we do know how to do but Moore’s thesis is that drinking has suffered in comparison to eating. An unsnobbish and eclectic but knowledgeable series of tips on what to drink, when and with what.
An Edible History of Humanity
By Tom Standage
Atlantic £19.99, 268 pages
The Economist’s business editor offers an intelligent account of the impact of food through history. He is especially good on the shift from hunter-gathering to farming and the spice trade’s role in interconnecting and mapping the world.
Au Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine
By Michael Steinberger
Bloomsbury £18.99, 256 pages
How could the tradition that invented haute cuisine and the world’s greatest cheeses and wines sink into mediocrity, overtaken by the Spanish new wave? Steinberger’s gripping history is written as much in sorrow as in anger.
Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal
By Tristram Stuart
Penguin £9.99, 448 pages
The systems of food production and distribution in rich countries waste huge quantities of edible grub while millions starve. How this “scandal”, or at least inefficiency, could be rectified is not a simple conundrum.
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Art
Compiled by Jackie Wullschlager
The Ultimate Trophy: How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World
By Philip Hook
Prestel £17.99, 224 pages
Hook has written a juicy insider account of the economics of taste and the means of seduction by which a Monet or Renoir, despised a century ago, is now a financial and artistic icon.
Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art
By Gregor Muir
Aurum £14.99, 250 pages
Actually, the YBAs never did fall, and Muir doesn’t put a foot wrong either: this lucid, lurid, indiscreet memoir of gilded gutters, “more drugs than milk”, Sensation, Hirst’s shark and Emin’s bed, is an unrivalled record of 1990s Cool Britannia, when British art wowed the world.
Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna
Edited by Nathalie Strasser
Yale £40, 272 pages
No lover of drawings should miss this scholarly, lavishly detailed volume. The catalogue to the show of mainly Old Masters, currently visiting the Scottish National Gallery from New York’s Metropolitan Museum, it includes revelatory works by Degas, Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh.
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Architecture
Compiled by Edwin Heathcote
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
By Tim Knox
Merrell £24.95, 158 pages
Soane was Britain’s most eccentric, darkest and most inventive architect and his house is an intoxicating, mad museum of deep Enlightenment learning, spurious history and morbid fantasy. This is the first proper book about this most influential of houses.
The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture
By Juhani Pallasmaa
Wiley £24.99, 160 pages
Finnish architect Pallasmaa’s extended essay “The Eyes of the Skin” was perhaps the most lyrical and humane of recent writings on architecture. This book elaborates on its ideas. Pallasmaa argues that contemporary culture privileges the visual and that architecture needs to readdress the physical through the act of making, being and living.
The Judicious Eye: Architecture Against the Other Arts
By Joseph Rykwert
Reaktion £29.95, 432 pages
A heavyweight and intellectually solid examination of the way in which architecture, once inseparable from sculpture and painting, was slowly divorced from art.
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Classical music
Compiled by Andrew Clark
Musical Heroes: A Personal View of Music and the Musical World Over Sixty Years
By Robert Ponsonby
Giles de la Mare £14.99, 212 pages
Ponsonby’s essays sum up a golden era of music-making. He gives us fly-on-the-wall portraits of the great musicians he knew in the course of a postwar career that took him from directing the Edinburgh Festival to the BBC Proms.
Tenor:History of a Voice
By John Potter
Yale £20, 305 pages
Tenors hit the highest notes and always get the woman. But did they always have the appeal of Placido Domingo? Yes – and more, argues this compact history. Potter shows how today’s breed are a shadow of their predecessors, who were as much part of the creative process as composers.
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Pop
Compiled by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
The England’s Dreaming Tapes
By Jon Savage
Faber £20, 752 pages
Savage’s fascinating oral history of punk is based on interviews conducted for his 1991 book England’s Dreaming. It covers prime movers such as Johnny Rotten, Malcolm McLaren and Joe Strummer alongside assorted schemers and hangers-on.
The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger
By Alec Wilkinson
Knopf $22.95, 176 pages
Expanded from a New Yorker profile, this crisp biography marks the 90th birthday of Pete Seeger, the folk singer and activist who requested “a book that can be read in one sitting”.
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Film
Compiled by Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment
Edited by Joe McElhaney
Wayne State University Press £28.50, 458 pages
The “Beau Brummel of the camera” gets his hour in the sun, or his 450 pages under the critical magnifying lens. Some essays here are a little delirious in their appraisal of the dandyish stylist who made Meet Me in St Louis and Gigi; others are right on the button.
Gertrud: The Moving Word
By James Schamus
University of Washington Press $17.50, 117 pages
Schamus, best known as Ang Lee’s regular screenwriter/producer (Brokeback Mountain, Lust Caution), pens a fascinating study of a single scene in Carl Dreyer’s late, Ibsenite masterpiece Gertrud (1964). Mainly for film wonks, but with passages of hypnotic perception.
