Book Reviews

A film critic friend, astonished that I had never heard of Shirley Jackson, told me to go and read her immediately. That was ten years ago and she has since become one of a handful of talismanic writers I reach for when craving literary succour. An undisputed master of the gothic and the uncanny— We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Hangsaman are both masterclasses in the unearthly and the opaque — she plumbs domestic and familial horror in a way which manages to be both universal and chillingly particular. She is also, in Britain anyway, still ridiculously underrated, even unknown. This new biography by the New Yorker critic

Two nature books have really stood out this year. The Great Soul of Siberia: In Search of the Elusive Siberian Tiger (Collins, £16.99) is by the Korean filmmaker Sooyong Park, who has been on the trail of his totem animal for 20 years and singlehandedly obtained most of the cinematic footage which humankind possesses of this, the largest felid on earth. He has now produced a classic evoking the utterly bleak landscapes of Siberia as well as the grotesque abuse meted out to wildlife by poachers. Yet the book is most memorable for its soaring beauty and for Park’s Franciscan love for his fellow creatures. Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of

John Bew’s biography of Clement Attlee, Citizen Clem (Riverrun, £30), is a winner, though it might have been improved by cutting. Attlee was a more interesting man than people supposed. He read an average of four books a week, wrote a good deal of verse and almost made a movie. He was acerbic. The sharpest letter I received during the six years I edited the New Statesman came from him. My consolation was that he regularly received similar rebukes from his fierce wife, Violet, delivered verbally. The book I most relished was Edgar Peters Bowron’s Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, two volumes in a boxed set (£195).

Philip Hancock’s pamphlet of poems Just Help Yourself (Smiths Knoll, £5): charming, authentic, trim reports from the world of work — City and Guilds, pilfering, how to carry a ladder, sex in a van (‘From the dust-sheet, wood slivers/ and flecks of paint stick to her arse’). One poem is called ‘Knowing One’s Place’; these poems know the workplace. Nutshell by Ian McEwan (Cape, £16.99) was hilarious and compelling. The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon (Cape, £16.99) was grim and compelling. Both books are ripping, gripping yarns — narrative Velcro. Click here for more Spectator Books of the Year

Nothing like a spot of murder as the evenings draw in. In this week’s podcast I talk to the crime writers Andrew Taylor and Simon Brett about the enduring appeal of the detective story — and why they are becoming harder and harder to write in the age of DNA profiling and forensic science. We talk, too, about golden age crime-writing, the Detection Club, and The Sinking Admiral — a witty new version of a literary game of consequences first played by Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and G K Chesterton back in 1931. You can listen here: And if you enjoyed that, please subscribe on iTunes for new episodes every

Constellation by Adrien Bosc (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) picks nimbly along the divide between fiction and non-fiction. It’s really a speculative group biography, telling the story of a Air France plane crash in the Azores in 1949, and the lives of the plane’s passengers, mostly (except for a quintet of migrating Basque shepherds) of an appropriately stellar socio-economic stratum. It does a fair job of knitting the known into the unknown, hopping from seat to seat like a solicitous flight attendant, shifting pace and perspective, throwing some metaphorical flesh on to the bare bones of what remains an unsolved tragedy (astrology, Bergson’s theory of durée, even — somewhat improbably — a