Spring has sprung! If you are looking for some light and portable new titles to take out into the sunshine with you, we’ve rounded up our top paperback picks, including a hair-raising history of psychedelics, a tour of alien life across the cosmos and the latest William Boyd spy drama.
Fiction
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
Few living British novelists write as well about the collateral damage of war as the Booker-winning Pat Barker. The Voyage Home is the third novel in her subversive and relevant reimagining of The Iliad, told from the perspectives of the Trojan women captured by the Greeks. It focuses on Cassandra, the royal prophetess of doom, who is forced to become concubine to the Greek king Agamemnon and foresees both their bloody ends. It is gory and surprisingly funny, with plenty of gruff wit.
Penguin £9.99 pp304
The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
In this inventive take on the American West, the action unfolds in Butte, Montana, in 1891, where the Irishman Tom Rourke earns money for drink and opium by penning love letters for fellow boozers in the tavern. He is a right old charmer and flees into the wilderness with Polly Gillespie, the new mail-order bride to a local big-shot, who sets a psychopathic bounty hunter on their trail. Kevin Barry has a wonderfully poetic, funny turn of phrase. A first-class chase novel full of grotesque characters and oddities.
Canongate £9.99 pp224
Precipice by Robert Harris
This novel might not be a top-tier Robert Harris novel, but even second-division Harris is far better than most of his peers and Precipice is a politically astute page-turner. The country is sliding towards the First World War and Ireland is on the brink of civil strife, yet the prime minister is distracted. Venetia Stanley is the latest in a line of younger women involved with Herbert Asquith, but she has a stronger hold on his mind, time and libido than her predecessors. His impassioned love letters form the core of the book and Harris recreates her lost replies.
Penguin £9.99 pp544
Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
In the 18th novel from the beloved author of Any Human Heart, our hero is six-year-old Gabriel Dax, who wakes in the night to find his house burning down and his mother dead on the drawing room floor. Fast forward to 1960. Gabriel is a travel journalist who is pulled slowly but irrevocably into a spiral of art markets, shady agents and left-wing magazines, trotting from Madrid to Warsaw, all the while trying to resolve his lifelong insomnia through psychoanalysis. A serviceable spy story stuffed with drama and confusion.
Viking £9.99 pp272
Isolation Island by Louise Minchin
Reality TV shows with their combination of intense atmosphere and cut-off location make an ideal setting for murder mysteries. The TV presenter Louise Minchin in her first novel maroons her characters in a ruined monastery on a Scottish island where an ill-assorted bunch of minor celebs, including an Olympic athlete and the inevitable “influencers”, pretend to be monks while competing for the prize of a lifetime. Quite how this squares with the ascetic existence expected of a monastic order is one of the novel’s best jokes. “It’s a riveting read,” the crime reviewer Joan Smith wrote, “especially when a storm cuts off contact with the production team, leaving the fractious contestants to deal with a dead body.”
Headline £9.99 pp320
Non-fiction
A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard by Simon Jenkins
Clear and admirably concise, this history of British architecture is perfect for the intelligent layman who knows a bit about Saxon churches, Elizabethan prospect houses, Palladianism, the gothic revival and the garden city movement and would like to know more about how they fit together. Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times and the chairman emeritus of the National Trust, writes with characteristic ease and authority and is particularly good on the snobbery over the suburbs.
Penguin £12.99 pp320
Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain by Madeleine Pelling
The urge to scribble on walls reaches back to ancient times, from prehistoric cave paintings to the pornographic sketches found in ancient Egyptian temples, but cultural historians have been slow on the uptake to chronicle this phenomenon. In her unusual and surprisingly engrossing account, Madeleine Pelling takes a closer look at the messages scrawled across tavern, prison and privy walls in 18th-century England and what they can tell us about society at large.
Profile £10.99 pp352
Alien Earths: The Search for Life in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger
“Don’t get me wrong,” Lisa Kaltenegger writes, “Earth is my favourite planet.” But if you assume, as optimistic astronomers do, that the universe is teeming with other worlds, Earth is probably “not yet at the grown-ups’ table”. This Austrian astrophysicist, a world leader in the accelerating search for extraterrestrial life, takes us on a vivid trip through the cosmos, explaining how scientists are using technology to detect hints of activity on distant planets.
Allen Lane £10.99 pp288
Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
This lovely biography tells the story of Louis Wain, the troubled artist who carved out a career as a cat hack artist for the illustrated press before ending up in a paupers’ lunatic asylum where he drew psychedelic, kaleidoscopic kittens decades ahead of their time (the Sixties pop artists loved them). Kathryn Hughes also tells the story of how the cat went from unloved mouse catcher to the most pampered of pets, given such lamentable names as Kiddlewinkpoops-Trot (belonging to Thomas Hardy) or Little Bunny Teedle Tit (a feline show champion).
4th Estate £10.99 pp416
Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War by Jonathan Dimbleby
Many books about the world wars are depressingly inelegant, but Jonathan Dimbleby’s works are in a different league. This titanic account of the Eastern Front in 1944 covers an enormous canvas from the Baltic to the Black Sea, but it is the human details that linger in the mind, from the panic of German soldiers driven backwards through the snow to the doomed heroism of Warsaw’s resistance fighters. Despite the harrowing subject matter, Dimbleby handles his material with such skill and wisdom that his book is a pleasure to read.
Viking £10.99 pp640
The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away a Generation by Sarah Wise
You will have heard about Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, in which “fallen women” were incarcerated and put to hard labour between the 18th and late 20th centuries. But few know that a comparable system operated in Britain during the 20th century, a system that has not been acknowledged or apologised for, let alone compensated for. Sarah Wise’s The Undesirables is a sprawling, shocking study of the impact of these institutions, the unmarried mothers who had their babies taken from them and the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act that made it possible.
Oneworld £12.99 pp352
Tripped by Norman Ohler
It is hard to imagine a field more promising — or more susceptible to quackery and charlatanism — than psychedelics. This entertaining, if occasionally melancholic, history showcases the fearful life-giving and death-dealing powers concealed within LSD, from 1950s CIA research into “the field of human consciousness” to modern microdosing as a way of optimising productivity.
Atlantic £10.99 pp240
And the best from the rest of the year …
Fiction
Mania by Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver’s entertaining satire on the culture wars opens in an alternative America of 2011 where “the last great civil rights fight” is under way. For too long, people perceived to be less intelligent have suffered hideous discrimination: far likelier to do badly at school and earn less. But a so-called mental parity movement, based on a conviction that human brains are all the same, has led to reforms. The word “dumb” is banned as a slur. The educational curriculum has undergone “decleverization”. Shows like Sherlock, which regard intelligence as praiseworthy, have disappeared. Pity then Pearson Converse, a freethinking and contrarian college lecturer who is cancelled after giving a talk about Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
Borough £9.99
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
This satire on the Tinder generation’s commitment issues takes a clever concept and turns it into a witty, ingenious debut novel — “One of the funniest debuts published in years,” wrote Johanna Thomas-Corr, our chief literary critic. Thirtysomething Lauren lives alone, but after returning home drunk from a hen-do one night she discovers that her flat has a magical attic that generates a revolving door of husbands. When she tires of one spouse she can summon another, just as long as she can coax the rejected man into the attic. Lauren’s life becomes a “spot-the-difference puzzle” with her possessions, hobbies, job, circle of friends and even body shape all subtly rearranged depending on the nature of the marriage. An enormously entertaining story that is silly as well as sophisticated.
Vintage £9.99
Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron
Mick Herron is best known for his Slough House thrillers, but long before that clan of misfit spies came Zoë Boehm, the protagonist of his debut novel, which is being reissued after more than 20 years in anticipation of of a TV adaptation featuring Emma Thompson. Boehm is an investigation agency head who, along with a housewife, Sarah Tucker, must investigate the case of a missing child and an explosion in a leafy Oxford suburb. As the pair of sleuths draw closer to the truth, they are caught in a web of murderous conspiracy theories, shady government forces and cold-blooded mercenaries. Baskerville £9.99
The Wrong Hands by Mark Billingham
The detective Declan Miller is a widower who still speaks to his murdered wife. When a couple of thieves steal a briefcase from a station lavatory, its contents — a pair of severed hands — present him not only with an opportunity to arrest a local gangster, but also to identify the killer of his wife. There’s a laugh on every page, yet it is the depiction of Miller’s grief that is most impressive and provides a heart-breaking finale.
Sphere £9.99 pp416
Quint by Robert Lautner
Quint, the grizzled shark hunter in Jaws (played by Robert Shaw in the 1975 film adaptation of Peter Benchley’s thriller), is last seen sliding down the side of his wrecked boat into the waiting jaws of his nemesis. This novel recreates his life as it leads up to that terrible moment. When we meet Quint, his third wife has just died. He is lost in a fug of booze and grief. He arm-wrestles for money and hustles where he can. He decides to rejoin the navy, which he left nine years earlier at the end of the Second World War. An interview with a young, smug recruiting officer changes tone when it emerges that Quint was one of a handful of survivors of the USS Indianapolis, sunk by the Japanese. This real event is central to Quint’s fictional story — the survivors floated for days, being picked off by circling sharks. Giles Coren loved this novel, writing Robert Lautner has “gone a long way to putting some of the balls back into serious English fiction”.
Borough £9.99 pp288
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
It is 412BC and in Syracuse on Sicily, the invasion by Athens has come unstuck and thousands of Athenian soldiers are imprisoned in quarries and slowly starving. Our central characters — the narrator Lampo and his friend Gelon, two local unemployed potters — hatch a harebrained scheme to stage a production of Euripides’ latest play, Medea, and the stars of the show will be the Athenian prisoners, who know Euripides’ work better than the locals do. It’ll be a performance “with a chorus, masks and shit”. Ah yes, Lampo and Gelon speak like Dubliners: “gobshite”, “bollix” and so on … It’s an eccentric idea and the story wobbles around a bit but this delightful debut, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, is written with energy and verve.
Penguin £9.99 pp288
James by Percival Everett
This scorchingly funny, action-packed reworking of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is narrated by Jim, the apparently sweet-natured slave in Mark Twain’s classic. Percival Everett’s Booker-shortlisted novel subverts this from the very first line — “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” He’s referring to Huck and Tom Sawyer, two of the best-loved characters in American literature, who decide to play a trick on him while he sleeps. Except here Jim is awake and only pretending to be superstitious, placid and illiterate because “it always pays to give white folks what they want”. As well as subversive humour, literary playfulness and a dash of moral indignation, you get a twisty adventure story.
Picador £9.99
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
Kate Atkinson’s much-loved private investigator Jackson Brodie is on the hunt for a painting that has gone missing from a dead woman’s bedroom. His inquiries lead to Burton Makepeace, a crumbling country estate, where a murder mystery weekend is taking place during a blizzard. Every character — especially Ben Jennings, the hunky, one-legged major with PTSD, and Simon, the mute, faithless vicar — comes laden with more baggage than simply their suitcases. Expect widespread dottiness and Yorkshire bloodings.
Penguin £9.99
Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan
Secrets. Scandals. Gangsters. Drug dealers. Corrupt politicians. Nazi-sympathising dukes. Shady Russians. Bitcoin traders. Ruthless retail tycoons. And they all live in modern-day Britain. Caledonian Road connects them in one great sprawling state-of-the-nation drama set across 2021 and 2022. At its centre is the charming, well-connected Campbell Flynn, an art historian and celebrity intellectual who owns a townhouse in a posh square in north London. The book follows Campbell as he grows close to one of his students, Milo, an angry, clever young man living in social housing, who sets in motion Campbell’s slow-motion fall from grace. An entertaining romp with political bite.
Faber £9.99
My Favourite Mistake by Marian Keyes
The seventh novel dealing with the misadventures of the Walsh family focuses on Anna, who is nearing 50, newly single and tussling with the menopause. She has left her glamorous life in New York and returned home to Ireland, where a friend in need draws her to the tiny Connemara town of Maumtully and she must help to save a luxury retreat from the wrath of the locals. Marian Keyes’s instantly endearing turn of phrase and an acute sense of comic timing help to transform this hefty novel into an incisive social commentary.
Penguin £9.99
My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld
The Dutch novelist Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker prize for his debut, The Discomfort of Evening, a grimly comic tale about a disturbed ten-year-old girl from a religious farming family. This follow-up is even more disturbing, a twisted tale of a 49-year-old vet abusing a small-town 14-year-old girl who shares a birthday with Hitler. This modern-day Lolita is the stuff of nightmares. Our reviewer, James Riding, wrote with a certain amount of admiration: “This book sickened me … My Heavenly Favourite belongs to a cursed pantheon of experiences so unsettling they bored into my dreams … Rijneveld has wallowed in the deepest wells of his imagination and concocted a book of virulent language and ghastly power.”
Faber £9.99
Munichs by David Peace
In this wholly convincing recreation of the 1958 plane accident that killed eight young Manchester United players, among others, David Peace plunges us deep into that snowy day in Munich when the plane carrying the team back from a successful European Cup game skidded off the end of the runway. His novel explores the aftermath, how it affected the team, the managers, the city, wives and girlfriends, and the surviving “Busby Babes”. Munichs hasn’t quite got the power of Peace’s masterpiece The Damned Utd, but it’s a touching evocation of a lost time when our finest footballers still took the bus into town and their biggest dream on retirement was to set up a pet shop.
Faber £9.99
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto
This clever, provocative debut is a campus novel for the age of alt-right messiahs, billionaire donors and woke activists. It’s set in a US college, a haven for all the academics who have been “cancelled”. The novel centres on a gifted physics graduate, Helen, who reluctantly follows her Nobel prizewinning boss to the institute after he gets mired in a sex scandal. This puts a huge strain on her relationship with her more left-wing partner, who is disgusted by this Ayn Randian fantasy of academic freedom, a place that its critics have dubbed “Rape Island”. The novel’s peculiar genius lies in how you’re never entirely sure where Julius Taranto’s sympathies lie.
Picador £9.99 pp304
The Wizard of the Kremlin by Giuliano da Empoli
Want to understand the strange world of Vladimir Putin and how he has stayed on top for 25 years? Read this novel by the Italian politico and pundit Giuliano da Empoli. It’s an account of the life of a Kremlin insider, Vadim Baranov, the “wizard”, a former theatre and TV director who treats politics like a form of reality TV. He puts his black arts to the service of “the Tsar” (guess who?), turning the country into one big, post-truth television show. Baranov, cynical and witty, is based on Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s Machiavelli, who has been called “the hidden author of Putinism”. An entertaining and eye-opening account of Russian politics.
Pushkin £9.99 pp304
Non-fiction
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker
Except for being excellent wordsmiths, what do Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann have in common? Each moved to the countryside after personal tragedy. In this sparkling portrait of three beloved 20th-century figures, Harriet Baker explains how the countryside was not simply an escape but a means of carrying out “new experiments in form, and feeling”, somewhere that time flowed differently. Woolf’s countryside death, wading into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets, forms a muted conclusion to a book that focuses admirably on the small and everyday. Baker won the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer Award for this accomplished debut.
Penguin £10.99
Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
In this madcap biography of the billionaire and newly appointed senior advisor to the president of the United States, Walter Isaacson boils Elon Musk down to two men: the cruel boss, who buys into conspiracy theories and bullies women, and the visionary genius, who has done more than anybody in the world to help to break our species’ addiction to fossil fuels and jump-start its journey back into space. The journalist shadowed Musk for two years, and the result is a book that follows the tycoon inside important rooms as well as exploring obscure regions of his mind, surrounded by a constantly rotating cast of engineers, venture capitalists, technologists and pregnant girlfriends.
Simon & Schuster UK £12.99
Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream
The values that form the basis for the vows taken by those entering the Carmelite order of Catholic nuns, including poverty and obedience, could not be more at odds with those of the modern world. Catherine Coldstream joined in 1989, at the age of 27, and spent 12 years of her life in a monastery that lacked any institutional checks, sleeping in a freezing cell, washing herself with a damp flannel, and donning a scratchy brown habit every morning. There were forced confessions, screamed abuse and even a nun-on-nun physical assault. Her memoir recounts many deeply shocking things that happened during that chapter of her life, but she writes with calm, measured clarity, a benefit of 20 years of hindsight.
Vintage £10.99
Truss At 10: How Not To Be Prime Minister by Anthony Seldon with Joshua Meakin
Anthony Seldon’s post mortems of each premiership are now as much a part of the constitutional formality of resignation as going to see the King or speaking from the steps of No 10. The historian’s books are always good and richly sourced, but this one, on the most ignominious 49 days British politics has known, might well be the best. It pays Liz Truss the ultimate compliment of taking her seriously — there’s even room for praise here, believe it or not — and as such the scholarly verdict is all the more damning. It’s not often that self-consciously serious books on politics are this entertaining.
Atlantic £12.99
A Very Private School by Charles Spencer
Charles Spencer, the brother of Princess Diana, was sent to Maidwell Hall boarding school aged eight. This near orphan-like bereavement was compounded by casual nastiness, sadism and the perversions of adults of both sexes. His account sheds light on the damage done to generations of boys at elite bastions of learning where the behaviour behind closed doors was beyond comprehension. He references therapy and his failed marriages — and dedicates his memoir to Buzz, his nickname before he was sent away. A heartbreaking read.
William Collins £10.99
Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love by Sophie Elmhirst
Not many great love stories start with a couple selling their Derbyshire bungalow, building a bespoke 31ft sailing boat and setting off towards New Zealand. But Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s does. Bored of their conventional 1970s suburban life, they planned to embark on a journey across the Pacific Ocean, but halfway around the world a whale cracked a hole in their hull and they found themselves adrift, alone together, on a tiny raft for more than 100 days. This remarkable story was the winner of the 2024 Nero Book awards non-fiction prize.
Vintage, £10.99
The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War by Nick Lloyd
This is the First World War from an unfamiliar angle — Austrian, German and Russian armies blundering across a vast landscape of marshes and grasslands, the front lines ebbing and flowing with dizzying speed. Nick Lloyd gives us an extraordinary saga of chaos and horror, moving from the peaks of Slovenia to the forests of east Prussia. “We are no longer men,” one Italian soldier wrote, “we are one with the earth.” A brilliant book, our reviewer Dominic Sandbrook said.
Penguin £12.99
Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne
In this jaw-dropping memoir, the self-confessed sociopath Patric Gagne explains what it’s like to experience emotions differently to other people. She pieces together events from her life to show how she is immune to the pangs of guilt, remorse and love that dictate most people’s actions. Cat-strangling, carjacking, lock picking and a party at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion feature in this eye-opening cocktail of pop psychology and shocking personal anecdote.
Bluebird £10.99
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
In the years between 2010 and 2018 rates of teenage depression doubled. A flick through old NHS records reveals that more than 10,000 girls under 18 were treated in hospital for self-harm in 2010, and that by 2016 number had swelled to almost 15,000. The American psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes the convincing case that the cause of this horrifying trend is smartphones. Instead of heading out with their friends, modern teenagers sit alone in their bedrooms, doomscrolling through social media content, which is often toxic, faked, envy-inducing or all three. James Marriott called it “a depressing but essential read”.
Penguin £10.99 pp400
Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era by Alwyn Turner
For sheer entertainment, this rollicking account of Britain before the Great War is hard to beat, brimming as it is with swindlers, murderers and charlatans, imperialist fantasies and saucy innuendos. The scope is vast, covering everything from the suffragettes to The Wind in the Willows, and Alwyn Turner proves a wonderfully enthusiastic narrator. Few historians, on introducing the cavalier figure of Edward VII, would remember to tell us that he owned a golf bag made from an elephant’s penis.
Profile £11.99 pp400
Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe by Sathnam Sanghera
The Times writer Sathnam Sanghera’s previous book, Empireland, was a bestseller, explaining in shocking detail how “modern Britain is rooted in our imperial past”. With this sequel, “a mix of memoir, travel, history and opinion”, our writer looks further afield to consider “British imperial legacies beyond Britain”. “There are plenty of new ideas, argued with passion,” Alice Loxton wrote in her review.
Penguin £10.99 pp464
The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson
Gary Stevenson joined the trading floor at Citibank in Canary Wharf, London, in the summer of 2008, just in time to have a ringside seat for the financial crisis, which didn’t seem to bother his colleagues much. By the end of Stevenson’s first year as a trader he had been paid as much as his dad had earned in two decades. The Trading Game is Stevenson’s account — his confession — of how he achieved this dream, becoming Citibank’s most profitable trader, and how it made him angry, dejected and ill. He eventually quit, disgusted by his colleagues’ profiteering. This excoriating attack on the low morals of high finance became a bestseller.
Penguin £10.99 pp432
Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills
Clair Wills digs deep into her family’s past for this fascinating slice of social history. In her twenties she discovered she had a cousin she had never met, erased from family history. Why? She had been born out of wedlock, in a mother and baby home in 1950s Ireland. She delves further, along the way telling the story of the 56,000 unmarried women who were admitted to such institutions in Ireland between 1922 and 1998. “Everything I’ve been describing was not out of the ordinary,” Wills writes. It was far too ordinary. Her book, written with care, wit and vulnerability, shows that ordinary tragedies deserve our anger and attention too.
Penguin £10.99 pp208
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