Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Thursday

Horatio Clare

The complexities of the dawn chorus

‘Tawny owls,’ I tell friends and family, ‘can’t see in the dark any better than we can. So they memorise the whole wood! But they may be able to see sound,’ I burble. ‘And the Latin name for a blue tit is Cyanistes caeruleus obscurus: Heavenly hidden blue one!’ In Bird School, Adam Nicolson rejoices in the detailed stories of some of the birds on his farm in Sussex. Its precursor, The Seabird’s Cry, a love letter to a dozen species, soared over the coasts of Scotland, ablaze with sea light. The Sussex Weald on a dull spring dawn offers a claggier setting. Puffins seem more interesting than marsh tits.

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Anne Sebba: The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz

37 min listen

My guest on this week’s podcast is the historian Anne Sebba. In her new book The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival, Anne tells the story of how a ragtag group of women musicians formed in the shadow of Auschwitz’s crematoria. She tells me about the moral trade-offs, the friendships and enmities that formed, and what it meant to try to create music in a situation of unrelenting horror.

Tuesday

Henry Jeffreys

The satisfaction of making wine the hard way

You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of ‘simmering insanity’, reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn’t have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn’s Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that he was idealistic, determined, romantic, perhaps a little dogmatic, and given to certain esoteric beliefs. Having now read his book Angels in the Cellar, I can say that my deductions were mostly right. Hahn is an American whose career as an investment banker came to an end when he suffered a breakdown in the back

William McEwan

Alzheimer’s research is challenging enough without a data manipulation scandal

‘In science, truth always wins,’ said the molecular biologist Max Perutz. In 2022, Charles Piller, an investigative journalist for Science, published an article posing a new set of obstacles to Perutz’s truism. He revealed cases of fabricated data in the area of Alzheimer’s research, setting off a cascading set of consequences for the researchers involved and for the field more generally. Doctored details how the dossiers of evidence were compiled in the lead-up to the publication of that 2022 article and the subsequent fall out. The central character is Matthew Schrag, a scientist at Vanderbilt University, who provided the expert analysis for Piller. The book is centred on the developing

Philip Hensher

Whether adored or despised, Princess Diana is never forgotten

What happened to the condolence books? They swiftly multiplied, that mad week in September 1997. The original four at St James’s Palace had to be increased to more than 40. People queued for hours and often spent many minutes composing their contributions. That’s not even to mention the thousands of similar books organised by councils, embassies and private businesses. The official set were ‘offered’ to the Spencer family. Perhaps they are at Althorp. Edward White’s Dianaworld, about the phenomenon of the former Princess of Wales, shows an indefatigable resourcefulness. It is not really about the woman herself but about the effect she had on people who never laid eyes on

Chloë Ashby

The mother of a mystery: Audition, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed

It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don’t know her name, but we do know she’s a successful actress. He’s beautiful, almost half her age, and she’s aware of how that must look to the other diners, the waiter hovering at her elbow, and her husband, who inexplicably enters after their food arrives before exiting in a hurry. She and Xavier had met two weeks earlier when he appeared at the theatre where she was rehearsing for a play and said he had something ‘complicated but important’ to tell her:

Guy Stagg

The enduring lure of Atlantis

When you picture Atlantis, what do you see? For most people, this mythic city is a classical arcadia sunk beneath the sea – fallen columns, shattered arches and perhaps even an aqueduct. But that is not the place described by Plato, the original source of the Atlantis myth. His version consists of an immense Atlantic island, many millennia older than the Egyptian and Babylonian empires. The popular image of Atlantis was created by Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. When that novel’s narrator, Professor Pierre Aronnax, joins Captain Nemo on his underwater exploration, they encounter a ruined city. He notices temples and even ‘the floating outline of

Thomas W. Hodgkinson

The Russian spies hiding in plain sight

In June 2022, Vladimir Putin tipped up at a party at the headquarters of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. This was to mark, of all things, the centenary of the country’s programme of deep-cover spies, who live for years abroad under elaborate false identities while passing secrets back to their masters at home. The weirdness of that espionage hoopla, just four months after the invasion of Ukraine, leaves one wondering what other bizarre birthday events Putin might have in his diary. The 85th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky, perhaps? Ah, you can imagine the banter. The cracker hats. The roll-out noisemakers. Yet it’s not out of the

Emily Rhodes

Orphans of war: Once the Deed is Done, by Rachel Seiffert, reviewed

In Rachel Seiffert’s searingly beautiful fifth novel, the author returns to Germany, 1945 – ground she previously explored in The Dark Room, her Man Booker-shortlisted debut. Once the Deed is Done opens with a boy, Benno, looking out of his window at night, having been woken by sirens from the munition works. Elsewhere in the town, Hanne and Gustav discover a runaway woman and young child sheltering in their shed. In the morning, the woman has fled, leaving just ‘the winter child’. Hanne decides to care for her, in secret, ‘because she was a child – just a child – left behind in this cold time… What else could she

Ariane Bankes

Anselm Kiefer’s monstrous regiment of women

The visionary artist Anselm Kiefer has restlessly challenged and redefined recent German history and cultural shibboleths in an extraordinary body of work that spans more than six decades. Two months ago he turned 80, an anniversary marked by the staging of exhibitions from Amsterdam to the Ashmolean and the publication of this impressive study devoted to the notable women that thread their way through his work, endlessly shape-shifting. Women are to be found everywhere in Kieferland: haunting, teasing, beckoning, seducing; imperious, impassive, poetic and unknowable. There are martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, Brunhilde and the Valkyries, Madame de Stael and Marie-Antoinette. There are women from the Bible –

Antony Beevor

The love that conquered every barrier – including the Iron Curtain

In our age of cosmetic fantasy, a dramatic love story between two bespectacled art historians sounds implausible. But add in the Montague-Capulet effect of the Iron Curtain, along with a fearless Russian heroine who proved that love can conquer every barrier, and you have an enchanting tale: a completely true one, beautifully written by the art historian and novelist Iain Pears, the author of An Instance of the Fingerpost among many other books. Pears, who had been a pupil of Francis Haskell, began to visit his former tutor’s widow Larissa Salmina on a regular basis after 2000. He soon realised from odd remarks just how extraordinary their lives had been.

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Lamorna Ash: why are Gen Z turning to Christianity?

40 min listen

My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Lamorna Ash, author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion. She describes to me how a magazine piece about some young friends who made a dramatic conversion to Christianity turned into an investigation into the rise in faith among a generation that many assumed would be the most secular yet — and into a personal journey towards religious belief.

Tuesday

Martin Gayford

‘Death is a very poor painter’: the 19th-century craze for plaster casts

On the morning of 7 May 1821 an urgent task was performed at Longwood House on St Helena. A day and a half previously, the celebrated prisoner for whom this dwelling had been built had died. Obviously it was necessary to make his death mask, and fortunately a British military doctor, expert in such matters, was at hand to do so. So it was that in times to come every bourgeois home in France ‘had its plaster Napoleon’, as Alain Corbin writes in this brief but highly original book. The proliferation of such casts was a feature of the age. Some homes became ‘virtual museums of the dead’. Artists’ sitting

Rachel Johnson

Bloodbath at West Chapple farm

Fifty years ago, the blasted bodies of three unmarried siblings, members of the Luxton family, were discovered at a Devon dairy farm, set in a lush stretch between the ‘lavender haze’ of Exmoor and Dartmoor. The youngest member of the family, Alan, was 55. He lay in his pyjamas and work boots on the cobbles in the farmyard. Robbie, 65, with cuts to his face, and Frances, 68, clad in a nightgown rucked up to her waist, were found together in the garden. All the doors to the primitive thatched family farmhouse were locked from inside. The ‘tragic trio’, as they were described by the tabloid press, were the last

Philip Clark

My adventures in experimental music – by David Keenan

David Keenan acquired his craft as a music writer, he says, from reading the crème de la crème of critics who milked rock music for all it was worth during the 1970s – Lester Bangs, Griel Marcus, Paul Morley, Biba Kopf – before deciding that rock criticism was not his bag. In the preface to this weighty collection of his music journalism, he says he considered himself more of a ‘rock evangelist’. The pieces originally appeared between 1998, when Keenan was writing for hardcore music magazines such as Melody Maker, MOJO and the Wire, and 2015, after which he checked out of regular reviewing duties to pursue his career as

Lee Langley

Adrift in strange lands: The Accidentals, by Guadalupe Nettel, reviewed

Borders have always played an important part in Mexican literature. Not only geographical/political frontiers but the more porous boundaries between past and present, the living and the dead. Between what is real and what is not. Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz and Juan Rulfo were all drawn to this shifting, unreliable territory. Time moves on and new talents emerge. Guadalupe Nettel is widely regarded as a leading writer of her generation, and in various ways her four novels and three short story collections continue to seek out the fantastic that lurks in the interstices of everyday life. The Accidentals, her most recent collection to be published in English, has an epigraph

Marcus Nevitt

Friends fall out in the English civil war

In April 1636, two aspiring lawyers, eager to make their way in the world, corresponded about the state of affairs in London. ‘Our best news,’ wrote Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, ‘is that we have good wine… the worse is that the Plague is in town and no Judges dye.’ The recipient of this letter was Bulstrode Whitelocke, a fellow member of the Middle Temple, who, like Hyde, would go on to write an indispensable contemporary chronicle of the British civil wars of the mid-17th century. What makes the intimate, wry irreverence of Hyde’s missive seem startling in retrospect is that the two men ended up on opposite

Nicholas Lezard

The benign republic of Julian Barnes

Not long into this essay I found myself wondering if it would have been published if the author were not Julian Barnes. I also wondered: would I have guessed the author’s identity if it had been withheld from me? Actually, it’s really five little essays, whose subjects are ‘Memories’, ‘Words’, ‘Politics’, ‘Books’, and ‘Age and Time’. Here is a sample from the first section: We change our minds about many things, from matters of mere taste – the colours we prefer, the clothes we wear – to aesthetic matters – the music, the books we like – to adherence to social groups – the football team or political party we

Chloë Ashby

The road trip from hell: Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts, reviewed

Throughout her quietly compelling second novel, Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts conjures a sense of trundling steadily towards disaster. The narrator, a young Australian woman called Eloise, is recounting a road trip that she and her husband Lewis took through the American Southwest in 2018 – while a deadly fire was sweeping through northern California. The trip was bookended by disasters you could describe as closer to home: before it, Lewis’s mother died; after it, Lewis disappeared. By combing through their time in and out of the ‘climate-controlled interior of the car’, Eloise tries to figure out what happened. The journey is part business, part pleasure. Eloise is researching her dissertation

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

The story of food in glorious technicolour

Have you ever suffered from museum blindness? A complete overwhelm at the sheer amount of stuff – often quite similar stuff – that prevents you from focusing on any one item? I know I have. Two-thirds of the way around a museum, even one I have true enthusiasm for, I find my eyes sliding off exhibits, reading the captions but not taking anything in. I have discovered the antidote in Repast by Jenny Linford. Produced in conjunction with the British Museum, using its collection and curators, it explores the global history of cooking, eating and drinking. At first glance it could simply be a coffee-table book. A thing of beauty,