Book Reviews

Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I write this, I should experiment with a glass of beer. In any case, one day back in the 1970s — when rock stars were particularly prone to experimentation — Bob Dylan dropped in on Neil Young, who played him a song detailing his extensive drug-related experiments (with grass, cocaine and amphetamines). At the end of the performance, Dylan remarked drily, ‘That’s honest.’ Young still laughs when he remembers this. Partly it was because Dylan, who had done some experimenting himself back in the day, knew where Young was coming from.

H is For Hawk (Cape, £14.99) is the most ‘A for Amazing’ book I’ve read in a long while. Helen Macdonald weaves together three separate but related strands to produce a majestic tapestry. No reader could fail to be more interested in its primary subject by the end — or to be impressed by the beauty of Macdonald’s prose. Donal Ryan burst on to the literary scene last year with his prize-winning The Spinning Heart. His latest novel, The Thing About December (Doubleday, £12.99), is a powerful rage against the moral vacuum at the heart of the Irish economy’s transformation into a Celtic Tiger, told in the sad, funny and utterly captivating story of

I have always loved Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. I now have an equal fondness for Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material (Heinemann, £14.99), which is a reworking of the Black Country classic translated to a Punjabi corner shop in Wolverhampton. Every bit as rich and sad and comic as the original. Meanwhile, back in the subcontinent, M.J. Carter’s The Strangler Vine (Fig Tree, £14.99) follows the trail of the Thuggees, the throttling sect of Kali-worshippers, and comes up with a startling denouement. Is it a thriller, or an anti-colonial satire or Wilkie Collins with saris? Irresistible any way you take it. If you loved Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, you won’t be able to remain indifferent to his Nora Webster (Viking, £18.99).

We know what to expect from the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize. Africans in tribal dress. Flame-haired girls posing with animals. Nudes, generally grotesque: obese hanging bellies, a limb missing here or there. Wizened (but wise!) faces. Low-level child pornography. In 2012 the National Portrait Gallery was fortunate to avoid the wandering gaze of Operation Yewtree. Certain archetypes always seem to make the grade. Perhaps the judges have finally woken up to the clichés, because the choice of finalists this year is not predictable but baffling. The first prize was awarded to David Titlow for a photograph of his nine month-old son. Imagine The Creation of Adam, with a dog in

I couldn’t work out whether Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (Ebury, £14.99) was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Tamar Cohen’s The Broken (Doubleday, £6.99) was that miracle — a novel about the disintegration of a middle-class marriage which didn’t make me sneer once, thanks to the cliché-free freshness of the writing. But my favourite book of the year has to be Unchosen: Memoirs of a Philo-Semite (Unbound, £14.99) by Julie Burchill: a wonderfully cool-headed and unbiased writer I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot

Inside the Dream Palace by Sherill Tippins (Simon & Schuster, £20). We’ve had biographies of great artists and writers, their spouses and children and their children’s pets. Here’s one about the place where most of them, from Jack Kerouac to Sid Vicious, seem to have hung out: the glamorously seedy Chelsea Hotel in New York. Not just a biography of a building, it amounts to an alternative history of 20th-century culture. How To Be a Husband by Tim Dowling (4th Estate, £12.99). Less a self-help than a self-hinder book, the Guardian columnist’s account of how he has coped with the challenges of matrimony (answer: badly) should really be called How Not To Be a Husband.