Seven Days in the Art World
by Sarah Thornton
Granta, £15.99 304 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12.79

It is doubtless Sarah Thornton’s academic credentials – a doctorate in sociology – that persuade her to describe Seven Days in the Art World as an “ethnographic project”. But don’t be put off. This is an entertaining and lucid account of the mysterious ways of contemporary art. It would have been unthinkable, and certainly unsellable, just 15 or 20 years ago. But we currently live in an extraordinary era for this most curious of cultural phenomena.