Parot has plundered this rich seam of inspiration to create a series of best-selling crime novels centred on the enigmatic police commissioner Nicolas le Floch. Set in Paris, in the second half of the 18th century, each novel unfolds over a year. For UK readers, Parot’s most recently translated novel is his fourth, The Nicolas Le Floch Affair, in which the detective himself comes under scrutiny for his involvement with an elegant Parisian socialite. French readers are eagerly awaiting the ninth novel in the series, and have enjoyed television adaptations of four of the books. Now in his early 60s, Parot has built up a huge library of books from and about the 18th century. But working as he currently does from his posting as ambassador in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa, Parot does not have these to hand. No matter, he says cheerfully: “the details are all in my head. I’ve got a very large memory for these things, so details come quite naturally.”

The Saint-Florentin Murders (Nicolas Le Floch Investigation)

Gallic Books 2010, Paperback, 432 pages, £5.99

For all his time-travelling and globe-trotting, there is one place to which Parot has not yet ventured – England. The author hopes to remedy this situation in the next year or so. In the meantime, he spoke to Bookhugger from his offices in Guinea-Bissau about his work and future literary plans.

Q: Is there something about diplomacy that lends itself to writing? In the past, there were the writings of Chateaubriand and Paul Claudel. Readers here now enjoy the fiction of Alexander McCall Smith. Are you part of some tradition?
A: I think it’s a bit less true nowadays, but in the past, diplomacy was a state of mind, a talent for observation and a type of intuition. It was also a way to explain things, and this was done by writing. Before computers and technology we used to write much more. Because we wrote so much, diplomatic life was a type of daily apprenticeship into literature. Then the fact that one was living in different countries, among different people, every four or five years encountering a new situation, would mean that one accumulated a heap of different impressions and emotions that one wanted to impart to others in some literary kind of way.

Q: Nicolas Le Floch is depicted as very observant, cool-headed, adept at ‘reading’ a tricky situation. Does the detective share any of these qualities with the diplomat?
A: The diplomat is often confronted by quite complex situations from which he may have to garner various different elements, and make an accurate assessment of them. He may also need intuition, so there too is something he shares with the detective.

But Nicolas Le Floch exists at a time when the French justice system was changing from being one in which little attention was paid to the scene of the crime and more weight was given to getting a confession, often either through interrogation or torture. This era was closing and moving towards one in which more efforts were made to find proof. Proof meant that the investigator had to be much more careful about what we nowadays call the crime scene. The investigator had to scrutinise all elements of the crime and try to piece them together to arrive at a reasonable suspicion of guilt.

Q: So is Nicolas an unusual detective for his era? To what degree would his contemporaries have still relied on using torture to solve crimes?
A: Nicolas [who is operating in the 1760s and 1770s] is atypical because he slightly anticipates the changes that came at the end of the 18th century. It was in the 1780s that Louis XVI abolished the ‘question prealable’ [one of two inquisition techniques abolished at the time, the other being the ‘question preparatoire’]. Prior to this move, several writers and philosophers had questioned the validity of a criminal justice system based on extracting guilty confessions from people subjected to torture. As a result of this debate, the ‘question’ technique was abolished. It was a major step in criminal investigation. But in my books, the investigators never use torture. It was being used far less by then; and Nicolas is a man of his time. He may threaten some of his suspects with using torture, but he never actually does.

Q: Why did you give Nicolas a Breton background?
A: I’ve kind of adopted Brittany as a region, if you like – my grandparents and my great-grandparents lived there a century ago. I was born in Paris, but have very close affinities with Brittany, and live there now, and have done for 40-odd years. So, I struck upon a character drawn from Breton origins. He was born in my mind rather abruptly – I suppose I said to myself, well here I am living in Brittany, I’ll make my hero a Breton who goes to live in Paris, a bit like D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, who is from Gascony and goes up to Paris with a lettre de recommendation. It’s the same for Nicolas. All the elements which shape his personality – his family, his friends, his relationships – have all come about in a fairly unstructured, uncalculated way.

Q: Why that particular period, the second half of the 18th century?
A: As a diplomat, I am a bit of a ‘canard sauvage’ [‘wild duck’] as we say here in France. I’m not your typically trained career diplomat, from the Quai d’Orsay. They usually have a generalist education in law or political sciences, or from ENA [the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration]. My background is in history, anthropology and Egyptology. When I did history, I researched the various Parisian neighbourhoods and their social structures just before the Revolution. I used notary archives, which tell you a lot about daily life at the time – marriage contracts, apprenticeship contracts, wills, all these documents give a very precise image of life as it was then. I’m also a specialist in Egyptian mummification techniques, I’ve studied human anthropology and when I was a student I would observe autopsies – what they called ‘opening up’ in 18th century parlance.

Q: How do you go about constructing your novels? What comes first – the plot and then is the historical detail added after that?
A: No, in fact I don’t write like that at all. I don’t have any plan. I decide what year the events are going to happen, I’ll strike upon an event that will be the catalyst – it could be a political event, and then I throw my detective at the crime. Then, I follow it, let it unroll in my head and almost dictate it to myself as I write it. At any moment in the day or night, I’ll take up my pen and carry on with the story, because it’s all there, all ready, in my head. It’s a strange way to work, it’s quite an unconscious way to write. I was at a book signing once in France, and many visitors were amazed to see me taking up my notebook and pen and getting on with the next book!

Q: The books abound with juicy detail, like the royal carriages that stink of urine because the over-privileged passengers simply relieve themselves in them as they travel. Where do you dredge up such details?
A: They’re all in my head! For about 40 or 50 years I’ve been collecting and reading books from the 18th century and about the era. I’ve got a large library of these works at home. As I’m often abroad, I don’t have these documents to hand, but the details are in my head. I’ve got a very large memory for these things, so details come quite naturally.

Nowadays nothing is really that exotic for us. On the television, from your armchair, you can enjoy far-off islands, strange animals, the deep sea. Places you’d never get to, now you can see in great detail. Where is the exoticism in all that now? Nowadays, the exotic is found either in science fiction in the future or, for me, by returning to our pasts – which is not so very far away, but is so incredibly different from our lives when you consider the progress we have made in so many fields.

Q: Aspects of 18th century society seem very violent. How accurate a depiction is that, particularly some of the grisly executions you describe, such as that of Damiens? [For the crime of attempted regicide in 1757, Damiens was burned with sulphur, his flesh torn with pincers, and finally drawn and quartered by four horses, dismembering his body.]
A: Damiens’ was a very gruesome execution, but he was a special case because he had wounded the king, which was worse than blasphemy in France then, because the king was sacred. When Damiens was arrested and tried, they went back in history to find a precedent to his crime, because it was very unusual. They went back to the assassination of Henri IV in 1610. They chose to punish Damiens in a manner befitting the 1600s, not the era he lived in. It was the same with the Chevalier de la Barre. But it was not the same throughout society. The early 1600s was the era of the terribly bloody Wars of Religions. The wars in the later 18th century were not as grisly. Things had changed.

History is not linear. There are parallel tracks within it but they do not run at the same speeds. For example, I talk of suicide in one of my books. At the time it was viewed as a terrible crime, you couldn’t bury a suicide victim in the cemetery, their bodies were paraded in the streets. But little by little, these morays disappeared because people started trying to understand how things happened and why.

Q: But characters such as Sanson, the sensitive executioner who was involved in Damiens’ execution – is his story taken from history or embellished?
A: It’s based on reality. I blend imaginary characters with those plucked from history, so they are interacting naturally together. With my training as a historian, I aim to ensure that everything that is historical is authentic and founded on real facts and sources. In fact, there is a French university student who has recently submitted a 1,000-page thesis on my novels, with the aim of deciphering what is real within a work of fiction. She has been through all the novels and checked the historical sources and elements. The result is that she has found that my novels are thoroughly founded on authentic historical facts, and in proper historical research. I wanted to write history in the form of a novel. But I knew that people don’t always want to read history. So mine is a way of sugaring the pill, getting people to enjoy history and to learn at the same time.

Q: One thing that remains constant is Nicolas’s love of good food. I’ve read that you too are a bit of gourmet, and that your dinners are renowned throughout West Africa.
A: Yes, you asked earlier what traits we shared and there aren’t many, because I find it more fun to describe someone completely different. But one thing we have in common is the love of good food. As a diplomat, I’ve always done the cooking, it’s a speciality of mine. I’ve tried to recreate that in my work. I don’t think you can create a character without showing how he lives, sleeps, eats, washes, dresses, moves about. It’s this accumulation of detail that conveys the sense of the era. Nicolas lives in a state of permanent tension, so these gatherings around a good meal are important for him. But this is also of its time. In 18th century France, cuisine became all the rage for a small section of the population – parts of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. Even Louis XV did a bit of his own cooking in his private apartments. Many more people starting cooking, and that stimulated debate about how to cook and what dishes should be like. There were books published for or against the ‘nouvelle cuisine’. It was like in the 1960s and 1970s – almost in the same terms!

Q: Nicolas’s deputy inspector Bourdeau often hints, quite darkly, that the current privileged way of life for some sections of society, cannot continue. What is the thinking behind Bourdeau’s role?
A: Bourdeau represents ‘the people’ in contrast to Nicolas, who has had this very mixed up-bringing among Breton peasants and aristocrats, and who seems to exist at a remove from ordinary people. Bourdeau yearns for change; he can see the difficulty in which the majority live (for instance, many poor people would go from house to house to collect leftovers to make soup). Also he is quite cultivated, he’s read Rousseau and other philosophers. But at that time, in the 1760s and 1770s, no one really anticipated the massive change that was to come with the Revolution. Nicolas seems to have a natural melancholy that may come from his Breton roots, but he is not aware of how ordinary folk live. The closer we get to the key years pre-Revolution, the more aware of this he will become.

Q: Do you plan to continue up to the Revolution with your work?
A: Yes, and beyond. I’m a big fan of those English sea-faring sagas, by Alexander Kent and C.S. Forester. These big sagas allow the reader to live with the hero over a 40-year time span. The reader almost appropriates the hero, there’s an extraordinary link between them, I love that.

Q: So rumours in the French press that you plan to keep going until book number 24 are correct?
A: Yes, God willing, and as long as my readers still want me!

Jean-François Parot was interviewed by Anna Brown

Author image © Ulf Andersen Gamma

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We Die Alone

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 256 pages, £3.32

We Die Alone, by David Howarth

In March 1943 a team of expatriate Norwegian commandos sailed from the Shetland Islands – the most northerly part of Britain – for Nazi-occupied Norway.Their mission was to organise and support the Norwegian resistance. They were betrayed and only one man survived the ambush by the Nazis. Crippled by frostbite and snow-blind, hunted by the Nazis, Jan Baalstrud managed to find a tiny arctic village. There – delirious, near death – he found villagers willing to risk their own lives to save him. David Howarth narrates his incredible escape in this gripping tale of courage and the resilience of the human spirit.

• Read Andy McNab’s introduction to We Die Alone

Electric Eden

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 672 pages, £8.99

Electric Eden, by Rob Young

In this groundbreaking survey of more than a century of music making in the British Isles, Rob Young investigates how the idea of folk has been handed down and transformed by successive generations – song collectors, composers, Marxist revivalists, folk-rockers, psychedelic voyagers, free festival-goers, experimental pop stars and electronic innovators.

In a sweeping panorama of Albion’s soundscape that takes in the pioneer spirit of Cecil Sharp; the pastoral classicism of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Warlock; the industrial folk revival of Ewan MacColl and A. L. Lloyd; the folk-rock of Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, Shirley Collins, John Martyn and Pentangle; the bucolic psychedelia of The Incredible String Band, The Beatles and Pink Floyd; the acid folk of Comus, Forest, Mr Fox and Trees; The Wicker Man and occult folklore; the early Glastonbury and Stonehenge festivals; and the visionary pop of Kate Bush, Julian Cope and Talk Talk, Electric Eden maps out a native British musical voice that reflects the complex relationships between town and country, progress and nostalgia, radicalism and conservatism.

An attempt to isolate the ‘Britishness’ of British music – a wild combination of pagan echoes, spiritual quest, imaginative time-travel, pastoral innocence and electrified creativity – Electric Eden will be treasured by anyone interested in the tangled story of Britain’s folk music and Arcadian dreams.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 384 pages, £7.18

How I Escaped My Certain Fate, by Stewart Lee

In 2001, after over a decade in the business, Stewart Lee quit stand-up, disillusioned and drained, and went off to direct a loss-making opera about Jerry Springer.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate details his return to live performance, and his cautious creep towards his position as the most critically-acclaimed stand-up in Britain.

Here is a blow-by-blow account of his snail-paced comeback, in the form of annotated transcripts of the three full-length shows that sealed his reputation, and details of his professional trials during the period.

Samuel Johnson

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 448 pages, £4.60

Samuel Johnson, by David Nokes

Johnson, born weak and half-blind, shambolic and poverty-stricken, became the most admired and quoted man in the eighteenth century. Thrown out of Oxford for a lack of funds, he rose to celebrity: author of the Dictionary, a friend to the king, companion of Reynolds, Goldsmith and Garrick. David Nokes looks beyond Johnson’s remarkable public persona and beyond the Johnson that Boswell to some extent created. Nokes looks at his troubled relationship with his first wife, whom he married for money but felt guilty about for the rest of his life; at his family, who haunted his dreams for years; and at his difficult, intimate relationship with Mrs Thrale. He shows a man who gave a quarter of the government pension he received to the poor, filled his home with the blind and destitute, and bequeathed his wealth to Frank Barber, an emancipated black slave brought from Jamaica. Insightful and engaging, Samuel Johnson draws an illuminating portrait of Johnson, his life and world.

The Kaiser’s Holocaust

Faber and Faber 2010, Hardcover, 400 pages, £9.36

The Kaiser’s Holocaust, by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen

On 12 May 1883, the German flag was raised on the coast of South-West Africa, modern Namibia. As settlers began to take over the tribal lands of the indigenous peoples, the Herero and Nama resisted and Germany launched a war of extermination. It ended with the construction of concentration camps, in which prisoners were systematically worked and starved to death.

Years later, the soldiers and bureaucrats who had administered the camps, and the racial theories that had inspired them, would play a role in the formation of Nazism. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen have uncovered extraordinary links between the Nazis and the atrocities committed in Africa under Kaiser Wilhelm. The infamous brown shirts worn by the Nazi storm troopers were colonial uniforms, originally designed as camouflage for the desert sand. The memory of Germany’s African empire was revived as inspiration for the Nazi’s wartime empire in the European East.

Using shocking new archival evidence, The Kaiser’s Holocaust is the definitive account of a genocide that was deliberately concealed for a century – a history that modern Germany has not yet come to terms with.

Today, as the graves of the victims are uncovered in the Namibian deserts, the re-emergence of the Kaiser’s holocaust poses a profound challenge to the notion that Nazi violence was an aberration in European history.

• Author David Olusoga on The Kaiser’s Holocaust

Red Plenty

Faber and Faber 2010, Hardcover, 448 pages, £9.67

Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford

Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called ‘the planned economy’, which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.

Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It’s about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. It’s history, it’s fiction. It’s a comedy of ideas, and a novel about the cost of ideas.

By the award-winning (and famously unpredictable) author of The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, Red Plenty is as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant – and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.

The Crusades

Pocket Books 2010, Paperback, 784 pages, £5.98

The Crusades, by Thomas Asbridge

In the eleventh century, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the pope, rampaged through the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean, seizing possession of Jerusalem, a city revered by both faiths. Over the two hundred years that followed this First Crusade, Islam and the West fought for dominion of the Holy Land, clashing in a succession of chillingly brutal wars, both firm in the belief that they were at God’s work. For the first time, this book tells the story of this epic struggle from the perspective of both Christians and Muslims, reconstructing the experiences and attitudes of those on either side of the conflict. Mixing pulsing narrative and piercing insight, it exposes the full horror, passion and barbaric grandeur of the crusading era. One of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject, Thomas Asbridge offers a vivid and penetrating history of the crusades, setting a new standard for modern scholarship. Drawing upon painstaking original research and an intimate knowledge of the Near East, he uncovers what drove Muslims and Christians alike to embrace the ideals of jihad and crusade, revealing how these holy wars reshaped the medieval world and why they continue to echo in human memory to this day.

City of Sin

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 384 pages, £7.75

City of Sin, by Catharine Arnold

If Paris is the city of love, then London is the city of lust. For over a thousand years, England’s capital has been associated with desire, avarice and the sins of the flesh. Richard of Devises, a monk writing in 1180, warned that ‘every quarter [of the city] abounds in great obscenities’. As early as the second century AD, London was notorious for its raucous festivities and disorderly houses, and throughout the centuries the bawdy side of life has taken easy root and flourished. In the third book of her fascinating London trilogy, award-winning popular historian Catharine Arnold turns her gaze to the city’s relationship with vice through the ages. From the bath houses and brothels of Roman Londinium, to the stews and Molly houses of the 17th and 18th centuries, London has always traded in the currency of sex. Whether pornographic publishers on Fleet Street, or fancy courtesans parading in Haymarket, its streets have long been witness to colourful sexual behaviour. In her usual accessible and entertaining style, Arnold takes us on a journey through the fleshpots of London from earliest times to present day. Here are buxom strumpets, louche aristocrats, popinjay politicians and Victorian flagellants – all vying for their place in London’s league of licentiousness. From sexual exuberance to moral panic, the city has seen the pendulum swing from Puritanism to hedonism and back again. With latter chapters looking at Victorian London and the sexual underground of the 20th century and beyond, this is a fascinating and vibrant chronicle of London at its most raw and ribald.

The Year That Changed the World

Pocket Books 2010, Paperback, 272 pages, £2.62

The Year that Changed the World, by Michael Meyer

‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ This declamation by president Ronald Reagan when visiting Berlin in 1987 is widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The West had won, so this version of events goes, because the West had stood firm. American and Western European resoluteness had brought an evil empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, in this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, begs to differ. Drawing together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin, Meyer shows that western intransigence was only one of the many factors that provoked such world-shaking change. More important, Meyer contends, were the stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; Lech Walesa; the quiet and determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who realized his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Michael Meyer captures these heady days in all their rich drama and unpredictability, providing a thrilling chronicle of perhaps the most important year of the 20th century.

All in the Best Possible Taste

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Paperback, 384 pages, £4.98

All in the Best Possible Taste, by Tom Bromley

Television past, as LP Hartley might have once said, is another country. And, in the early 1980s it certainly was a different beast. There were still only three channels to watch; the evening’s programmes finished with the playing of the national anthem; and the biggest prize on TV was not Chris Tarrant’s million pounds but a speedboat on Bullseye… But as Tom Bromley suggests in this funny and warming memoir, all that was about to change: The 1980s saw the end of the original golden era of television, and the beginnings of TV as we know it today. In 1982, Channel 4 became the first new terrestrial channel for almost twenty years and by the end of the decade, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television was vying to become Britain’s first multi-channel provider. The result of all this was that slowly but surely, British viewers had more choice than ever before and the cost of this choice was the erosion of television as a shared national event. And no-one felt this change more deeply than Tom Bromley. Television played a large part in Tom’s childhood. His first word was ‘two’, as in BBC Two, and his earliest childhood memory is seeing Johnny Ball at a church fete. With great humour and affection, Tom Bromley tells the story of a childhood spent with his three siblings and that other all-important family member; the television set.

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Reality is a lottery of horror whose chaos led humans to develop an alternate world of hope and plans. Human existence is what we do in the gap between those worlds. All joy and failure arise from managing that fragile duality – and unhappiness from trying to live too far above horror. Life is most bountiful when we stay low and expect little. As with limbo: decide to die – then live. But protect your gap, as regimes will seize it to fill with their ideas, controlling your fears for their gain – and none more than commerce, assuring us we’re different, and should expect more. This evening’s vital message then: Mind the Gap.

Lights Out in Wonderland

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 336 pages, £6.49

September sees publication of Lights Out in Wonderland, DBC Pierre’s third novel; in some ways the concluding fiction in what he has referred to as an End Times Trilogy. The three novels are ostensibly unrelated; what links them is style and sensibility. Vernon God Little, conceived and written in advance of the Columbine massacre, is a high-wire satirical farce set in Texas, relating the (mis)adventures of 15-year-old Vernon on the run from the law, and a world turned to hate, vengeance and sloth. The criminally overlooked (at the time of publication at least, with Pierre on the crest of a Man Booker wave about to crash on Realism’s shores) Ludmila’s Broken English imagines the release of two recently separated conjoined twins, Blair and Gordon, and their trip into a war-ravaged Caucasian backwater. Pierre’s high baroque prose, his fearless and deliberately unsubtle allegorical picaresque, served as an Eastern response to Vernon’s version of a flatulent West, increasingly depicted as ‘an old bitch gone in the teeth’ – to quote Ezra Pound, a poet and theorist who delighted in smashing through linguistic barriers and making enemies of the establishment in the first half of the twentieth century.

Lights Out in Wonderland takes as its setting, London, Tokyo and Berlin – and an earlier version of the novel (the original draft of which ran to over 800 pages) – included chapters set on the Galapagos Islands. As someone who grew up in Mexico, with an Australian birth certificate and British parents, now resident in Ireland, Pierre’s fiction is truly global: his imagination is fired by the degradation, perversions and abuses that dominate the narrative of these times, whether it be the circumstances around mass murder and the perverse celebrity this can bring, or a character’s pursuit of pleasure to the cost of all else around him.

Lights Out completes a loose trilogy with this very character in the shape of Gabriel Brockwell, a poet in his mid-twenties, who comes to the realisation in rehab that in a world, and with humanity, so in thrall to capitalism, there is only one true choice left open to the individual: to live very fast, and die very young.

DBC Pierre discusses Lights Out in Wonderland from FaberBooks on Vimeo.

Looking at these books in the broader landscape of contemporary fiction, they look very singular. Realism and naturalism so dominate the narrative landscape today; to me this seems increasingly perverse and out-of-step with the strangeness of the times. As our lives have become so mediated, rootless, and lived out in fantastical, remote, internalised techno landscapes, contemporary fiction seems increasingly wedded to a faithful presentation of the real, what happened to whom and why – two other notable exceptions here are Alan Warner and Richard Milward. There has been a migration to the real and the solid – and this is as true of the building blocks of narrative (sentences, prose) as it is of plot, structure, theme, the nuanced subtleties of what lies behind story. Does this represent some kind of retreat from the hysteria of consumer culture? Is this a reaction against the excesses of the magical prose which threatened to dominate late twentieth century fiction in the wake of Rushdie, Calvino, Marquez and others? And what has happened to the great tradition of the decadent novel? Fiction less interested in reflecting back a ‘true’ version of society and contemporary morals and manners; fiction which instead engages with the hyper-reality of our lives, the grotesque ways in which a character’s progress can embody the spirit of the times, however bizarre things may seem.

There are very few writers working within this tradition today. Both J . K. Huysmans (in A Rebours) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray) created fantastical narratives with bloated decadence as their theme. Des Essientes and Gray were characters for, and of, the times in which they were conceived and both novels follow an interest in transgression that, through marvellously glided prose and imaginative fancy, faithfully represented the fin-de-siecle spirit without recourse to bread and butter reality. Both books were misunderstood, even condemned on publication – Wilde for being ‘mawkish and nauseous’, ‘unclean’, ‘effeminate’, and ‘contaminating’; Huysmans for his rejection of French naturalism under the grand tutelage of Zola (and for the barbaric act of having his character set precious jewels in the shell of a tortoise. But these are fearless, ambitious, uninhibited works of literature that have come – through prose and conception that owes nothing to naturalism – to represent the spirit of the age. In this (our) ‘age’ of excess, waste and sensation, where are the writers prepared to take on the grand narratives, stories conjured from the vanities that surround us, infused with manic energy and transforming imaginative wit and daring?

DBC Pierre is one such writer who should be celebrated for taking on this challenge. Lights Out in Wonderland both revels in and condemns the debauched personality of these End Times. Like Des Essientes, Gabriel Brockwell is an aesthete dressed-up in hedonist garb and his fantastically improbable journey to salvation, and philosophising along the way, seems to me classically in-tune with the great decadent tradition in literature. Indeed, these lines towards the end of the novel seem to make this explicit:

We will all be destroyed whether we like it or not. I say let’s like it. May this small book of certainties from a short life be your compass in a decadence, your mentor in times of ruin, your friend when none is near; and may its poking from your pocket be a beacon to all who share our spirit in end times.

To understand the true horror and sickness of a world engorged on greed, high living and the capitalist dream, we need fiction that is prepared to shock, entertain and unsettle. DBC Pierre’s new novel launches itself into this territory with the intuitive intelligence and wild energy of an artist prepared to paint his version of the world in colours and shades that owe nothing to realism or naturalism. Sometimes the world appears brighter when seen through the decadent lens.

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Lowboy

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 258 pages, £3.18

Lowboy, by John Wray

Underground, in the tunnels beneath New York, a young man is missing. Above ground, Ali Lateef of the NYPD is assigned the case. The boy’s mother is reluctant to help and Emily, his girlfriend and only confidante, appears to have vanished too. Can Lateef find Lowboy before it’s too late? An extraordinary chronicle of a desperate young man and the race to find him, Lowboy is a modern masterpiece.

The Gathering Night

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 389 pages, £1.95

The Gathering Night, by Margaret Elphinstone

Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when her brother goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia’s mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son.

• Read the author’s afterword

The Accident

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 263 pages, £8.40

The Accident, by Ismail Kadare

On the autobahn in Vienna a taxi leaves the carriageway and strikes the crash barrier, flinging its male and female passengers out of its back doors as it spins through the air. The driver cannot explain why he lost control; he only says that the mysterious couple in the back seat seemed to be about to kiss …Set against the tumultuous backdrop of war and its aftermath in the Balkans, The Accident intimately documents an affair between two people caught in each other’s webs. The investigation into their deaths uncovers a mutually destructive obsession that mirrors the conflicts of the region. A destabilising mixture of vivid hallucination and cold reality, Ismail Kadare’s new novel is a bold and fascinating departure.

All the Colours of the Town

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 336 pages, £2.78

All the Colours of the Town, by Liam McIlvanney

When Glasgow journalist Gerry Conway receives a phone call promising unsavoury information about Scottish Justice Minister Peter Lyons, his instinct is that this apparent scoop won’t warrant space in the Tribune. But as Conway’s curiosity grows and his leads proliferate, his investigation takes him from Scotland to Belfast. Shocked by the sectarian violence of the past, and by the prejudice and hatred he encounters even now, Conway soon grows obsessed with the story of Lyons and all he represents. And as he digs deeper, he comes to understand that there is indeed a story to be uncovered – and that there are people who will go to great lengths to ensure that it remains hidden.

Compelling, vividly written and shocking, All the Colours of the Town is not only the story of an individual and his community, it is also a complex and thrilling enquiry into loyalty, betrayal and duty.

The Anthologist

Pocket Books 2010, Paperback, 308 pages, £3.71

The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker

The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet of some little reknown who is sitting in his barn most of the time trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry called Only Rhyme. He’s having a hard time getting started because his career is falling apart, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and actually deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised his readers that he will reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he’d thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, among other things; Paul tells us about all of the great poets, from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the contemporary scene as well as the editorial staff of The New Yorker’s editorial department. And what he reveals about the rhythm and music of poetry itself is astonishing and makes you realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul manages just barely to realize all of this himself and what results is a tender, wonderfully romantic, often hilarious, and inspired novel.

Of Beasts and Beings

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Paperback, 240 pages, £5.85

Of Beasts and Beings, by Ian Holding

Militia seize an innocent captive and subject him to a nightmarish overland journey that feels as though it will never end. Meanwhile, a lonely white schoolteacher wrestles personal demons whilst attempting to overcome the everyday difficulties of a life in which power cuts last for months at a time, homes are left without running water, brawls break out over even the most basic necessities and an atmosphere of fear and intimidation presides. Which of them is in the gravest danger, and does either have the power to escape their fate?

In this highly original, searing and timely new novel, we witness the devastating effects of a country’s economic and moral collapse. In a world where greed, barbarism, anarchy and lawlessness are rife, how do the honest survive? Is it possible to keep a conscience when all those around you have lost theirs?

Eleven

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Paperback, 304 pages, £6.90

Eleven, by Mark Watson

Xavier Ireland is a radio DJ who by night listens to the hopes, fears and regrets of sleepless Londoners and by day keeps himself very much to himself – until he is brought into the light by a one-of-a-kind cleaning lady and forced to confront his own biggest regret. This is a tale of love, loss, Scrabble and six degrees of separation, asking big questions about life and death, strangers and friends, heartache and comfort, and whether the choices we don’t make affect us just as powerfully as those we do.

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Half Broke Horses

Pocket Books 2010, Paperback, 320 pages, £4.01

Half Broke Horses, by Jeanette Wells

A debut novel based on the extraordinary life of Jeannette Walls’ maternal grandmother – a sassy, straight-talking heroine for whom saving lives, taming wild horses and beating ranch hands at poker are all in a day’s work. Born in 1901 in the rolling grassland of West Texas, at the age of 15, with very little formal education, Lily Casey Smith left home to begin teaching in a frontier town, riding 500 miles on her beloved pony, Patch, all alone, to get to her job. She went on, with her husband, to run an 180,000 acre ranch in Arizona and to raise two children, one of whom is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls. Readers will love and marvel at this intrepid woman, for her fearlessness, her courage, her wicked sense of humour. A true adventurer!

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The Saint-Florentin Murders (Nicolas Le Floch Investigation)

Gallic Books 2010, Paperback, 432 pages, £5.99

These are difficult times for Nicolas Le Floch: Louis XV is dead and Nicolas’s boss Sartine has been promoted to Minister of State for the Navy. Le Noir, Sartine’s successor as Lieutenant General of Police, distrusts Le Floch. Monsieur de Saint-Florentin, the King’s new minister, entrusts Commissioner Le Floch with the investigation into the murder of a chambermaid whose throat was cut in unusual circumstances at Saint-Florentin’s home.

Le Floch’s enquiry takes place both in Paris and Versailles, where he secures his position alongside the King and must confront the mysteries of the Trianon and the horrors of Bicetre.

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The Gathering Night

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 389 pages, £1.95

The Gathering Night, by Margaret Elphingstone

Between Grandmother Mountain and the cold sea, Alaia and her family live off the land. But when her brother goes hunting and never returns, the fragile balance of life is upset. Half-starved and maddened with grief, Alaia’s mother follows her visions and goes in search of her lost son. The Gathering Night is a story of conflict, loss, love, adventure and devastating natural disaster. This gripping novel is set deep in our stone-age past, but resonates as a parable for our troubled planet 8,000 years on.

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Cover Her Face

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 288 pages, £2.89

Cover Her Face, by PD James

St Cedd’s Church fête had been held in the grounds of Martingale manor house for generations. As if organizing stalls, as well as presiding over luncheon, the bishop and the tea tent, were not enough for Mrs Maxie on that mellow July afternoon, she also had to contend with the news of her son’s sudden engagement to her new parlour maid, the sly single mother, Sally Jupp. On the following morning Martingale and the whole village are shocked by the discovery of Sally Jupp’s body.

Investigating the violent death at the manor house, Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is embroiled in the complicated passions beneath the calm surface of English village life.

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Snow (Revolutionary Writers)

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 448 pages, £1.94

Snow, by Orhan Pamuk

The year is 1992. Ka, a poet and political exile, returns to Turkey as a journalist, assigned to write an investigative piece about troubling events in the small and mysterious city of Kars near the Armenian border.

The snow is falling fast as Ka arrives, and soon all roads are closed. He discovers a city plagued by a ‘suicide epidemic’ amongst young women, and where the Islamists are poised to win the municipal elections. If he wants to understand what’s happened to this part of the world during his absence, this is the place to begin.

But the rogue coup that unfolds before his eyes over the next three days tells him far more than he wants to know. He sees a city wasting away under the shadow of Europe, consumed by religious and political conspiracies, and haunted by the silences of its own history.

Snow angered Islamists and westernised Turks alike when it came out in early 2002 – and promptly sold more than 100,000 copies. A spectacular tour de force, it evokes the spiritual fragility of the non-western world, its ambivalence about the godless West, and its fury.

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Still, I’m fairly sure that in the 1970s and the 1980s the space allotted to literature on telly was broader, less apologetic, and scheduled at an hour more likely (in the words of the late Dennis Potter) ‘to catch the audience with their pants down.’ Thus, at hours when I ought to have been doing my homework, television allowed me to eavesdrop on P.D. James and Christopher Hitchens arguing about Anglo-American relations; on Martin Amis and Saul Bellow debating the ‘moronic inferno’ of contemporary culture; on Anthony Burgess and George Steiner trying to determine the precise afternoon when literary Modernism began. I can remember generous South Bank Shows on Derek Walcott and David Mamet, Garcia Marquez and Marguerite Duras. The BBC’s Late Show would happily serve up an hour’s worth of Susan Sontag in conversation; or kick-start studio debates about more pressing matters, as on the night of the day of the Khomeini fatwa against The Satanic Verses, when Hanif Kureishi, asked what would be his advice to the embattled author, urged Salman Rushdie to go get himself a gun.

The great thing about this heritage of audiovisual material is that it seems largely to have survived and matured into a well-managed archive. The BBC once had a dodgy reputation for wiping clunky old tape recordings of cultural broadcasts, but the digital age has now shed light on a wealth of preservation. And if you are interested in hearing literary voices of the past imparting deathless wisdom about their craft, I urge you to check out BBC4’s currently airing series In Their Own Words: British Novelists, a three-part compilation of material culled from those various BBC arts strands (Monitor, Bookstand) that featured interviews with major authors. The final episode, Nothing Sacred, airing Monday August 30, takes us up as far as the 1990s and the aforementioned Mr Rushdie and friends. The Age of Anxiety (1945-1969) offers Tolkien, Golding, James Bond, Doris Lessing and the so-called Angry Young Men. But the real gem seems to me the opener, Among the Ruins 1919-1939, available on IPlayer until September 6.

Therein you will find novelists who made their names between the wars, putting wary toes into the relatively new medium of television, blinking into lights and subjecting themselves to light grilling. Evelyn Waugh, questioned quite truculently by John Freeman of the quick-fire Face to Face show, remarks airily that he is doing the interview for money and claims to have no idea why people think him a ‘snob’, though he does admit to the sin of ‘irritability’ (which he felt towards ‘absolutely everything.’) PG Wodehouse, in life a far sturdier fellow than in my imagination, is seen being exceptionally amiable and pipe-smoking and candid from a garden chair at his Long Island retreat, insisting that he couldn’t become a ‘serious’ writer if he tried, and that he would never allow such footling issues as character psychology to get in the way of the precise working-out of his brilliant plots (‘Oh heavens, no…!’).

Some of the authors shown clearly had a harder time adjusting to the impertinence of the TV interviewer. A wary Robert Graves, quizzed by that awful old fraud Malcolm Muggeridge, finds himself forced to sound as dismissive as possible about a homosexual ‘phase’ while he was at Charterhouse. T.H. White, made rich and famous by his sequence of novels about Arthurian legend, is depicted at leisure on one of the Channel Islands, insisting he lives very modestly, what with his swimming pool and purpose-built temple to Hadrian, and the perennial demands of the taxman.

Against such defensiveness, it’s a pleasure to see Christopher Isherwood, gamely if ineptly pretending to jog down sunny Venice Beach in long trousers, before pulling up in front of the attendant BBC crew so as to tell the viewers all about how he used to live in Berlin. Though not an easygoing speaker, Isherwood, author of I Am a Camera, clearly understood what the lens was for, also how to address it.
Graham Greene, however, possibly understood these matters too well, and so refused to allow his face to be photographed for an early BBC study of his work. Instead, surviving footage offers abstracted parts of his dark-suited frame as he and the interviewer converse in a carriage of a night train rattling through Lausanne. The reason Greene gives for this subterfuge is beautifully lucid: he is ‘afraid of playing a part on screen… the part of a writer.’

This strikes me as a very fine and early formulation of an ongoing problem for writers, who are required to seek media ‘exposure’, ‘coverage’ and ‘profile’ for their work while knowing full well that the work itself has either said what needs saying or else is of little use to anyone. Moreover, any artist knows it’s best to retain a little mystery around one’s persona and creative process, rather than spilling one’s guts all round the houses. Still, our age is one wherein Katie Price is, amazingly, and among other things, a bestselling novelist; and, famously, there’s not much Katie won’t do. Even writers whose work is far removed from Angel or Crystal must face the uncomfortable truth that, these days, the retiring types struggle to get a start in the great cultural marketplace. If the likes of a JD Salinger or a Thomas Pynchon came along today with the resolute intent of going about their business unrecognised and unmolested, would anyone get to know about their stuff in the first place? Or would a 21st-century Salinger be out there avidly blogging and tweeting and web-chatting all about how he first ‘got the idea’ for The Catcher in the Rye? (‘Thanks for your question, jane1563…’) I’m not sure, nor can I honestly say which of these seems to me the least palatable scenario. But, while I remain quietly relieved that Dostoyevsky or George Eliot didn’t live to have to hawk their wares out there on Sky TV, I do think it a valuable thing that, once upon a time, novelists of stature were allowed into our living rooms to speak their minds; and In Their Own Words is a treasurable souvenir of that bygone era.

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The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 400 pages, £1.64

The Complete Brigadier Gerard, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Mon Dieu! The extraordinary, sabre-rattling adventures of Gerard, a young French cavalry officer in the time of the Napoleonic wars, introduce a hero who will be adored by fans of Flashman and Sherlock Holmes alike. Gathered here in one edition are both volumes of Conan Doyle’s much loved tales, which will delight modern readers with their absurdist humour, infectious warmth and swash-buckling energy.

The Ghost Rider

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 220 pages, £3.54

The Ghost Rider, by Ismail Kadare

An old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. The woman opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to her, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is chain of events which plunges a medieval village into fear and mistrust. Who is the ghost rider?

The Last Station

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 384 pages, £0.01

The Last Station, by Jay Parini

1910. Anna Karenina and War and Peace have made Leo Tolstoy the world’s most famous author. But fame comes at a price. In the tumultuous final year of his life, Tolstoy is desperate to find respite, so leaves his large family and the hounding press behind and heads into the wilderness. Too ill to venture beyond the tiny station of Astapovo, he believes his last days will pass in peaceful isolation. But the battle for Tolstoy’s soul will not be so simple.

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

Canongate Books Ltd 2010, Paperback, 352 pages, £6.16

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, by Andrew McConnell Stott

The son of a deranged Italian immigrant, Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837) was the most celebrated of English clowns. The first to use white-face make-up and wear outrageous coloured clothes, he completely transformed the role of the Clown in the pantomime with a look as iconic as Chaplin’s tramp or Tommy Cooper’s magician. One of the first celebrity comedians, his friends included Lord Byron and the actor Edmund Kean, and his memoirs were edited by the young Charles Dickens. But underneath the stage paint, Grimaldi struggled with depression and his life was blighted with tragedy. His first wife died in childbirth and his son would go on to drink himself to death. The outward joy and tomfoolery of his performances masked a dark and depressing personal life, and instituted the modern figure of the glum, brooding comedian. Joseph Grimaldi left an indelible mark on the English theatre and the performing arts, but his legacy is one of human struggle, battling demons and giving it his all in the face of adversity.

The Red Queen (Cousins War Trilogy 2)

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 400 pages, £8.26

The Red Queen, by Philipa Gregory

The second book in Philippa’s stunning new trilogy, The Cousins War, brings to life the story of Margaret Beaufort, a shadowy and mysterious character in the first book of the series – The White Queen – but who now takes centre stage in the bitter struggle of The War of the Roses.

The Red Queen tells the story of the child-bride of Edmund Tudor, who, although widowed in her early teens, uses her determination of character and wily plotting to infiltrate the house of York under the guise of loyal friend and servant, undermine the support for Richard III and ultimately ensure that her only son, Henry Tudor, triumphs as King of England. Through collaboration with the dowager Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret agrees a betrothal between Henry and Elizabeth’s daughter, thereby uniting the families and resolving the Cousins War once and for all by founding of the Tudor dynasty.

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The Oath (Knights Templar Mysteries (Simon & Schuster))

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 400 pages, £11.22

The Oath, by Michael Jecks

1326. In an England riven with conflict, knight and peasant alike find their lives turned upside down by the warring factions of Edward II, with his hated favourite, Hugh le Despenser, and Edward’s estranged queen Isabella and her lover, Sir Roger Mortimer. Yet even in such times the brutal slaughter of an entire family, right down to a babe in arms, still has the power to shock. Three further murders follow, and bailiff Simon Puttock is drawn into a web of intrigue, vengeance, power and greed as Roger Mortimer charges him to investigate the killings.

Michael Jecks brilliantly evokes the turmoil of fourteenth-century England, as his well-loved characters Simon Puttock and Sir Baldwin de Furnshill strive to maintain the principles of loyalty and truth.

Day After Night

Pocket Books 2010, Paperback, 304 pages, £1.63

Day After Night, by Anita Diamant

Atlit is a holding camp for “illegal” immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place.

Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.

A Plague of Heretics (A Crowner John Mystery)

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Hardcover, 416 pages, £11.49

A Plague of Heretics, by Bernard Knight

With the city of Exeter ravaged by an outbreak of the ‘yellow plague’, Sir John de Wolfe, the county coroner, must divide his time between visiting his brother Willam who has been struck down by the disease, and dealing with a series of brutal murders which appears to be linked to a revival of heresy in the city.

When some of the cathedral canons begin a crusade against this danger to the Church, Sir John is accused of being too sympathetic to the heretics, bringing him into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities. As the situation worsens, the coroner finds himself having to seek sanctuary in order to save his skin. Can he survive long enough to unmask the real killer?

A Gambling Man

Faber and Faber 2010, Paperback, 592 pages, £5.99

A Gambling Man, by Jenny Uglow

From acclaimed biographer Jenny Uglow, a portrait of Charles II and the first decade of the Restoration: a time of glamour and gossip, drama and risk, faction and crisis.

Charles II was thirty when he crossed the channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after the long years of Cromwell’s rule. But there was no going back, no way he could ‘restore’ the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled with his father’s beheading. ‘Honour’ was now a word tossed around in duels. ‘Providence’ could no longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire and war, people searched for new ideas by which to live. Exactly ten years later Charles would stand again on the shore at Dover, laying the greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV.

The Restoration decade was one of experiment: from the science of the Royal Society to the startling role of credit and risk, from the shocking licence of the court to the failed attempts at toleration of different beliefs. Negotiating all these, Charles, the ‘slippery sovereign’, layed odds and took chances, dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theatres were restored, but it was the king who was the supreme actor. Yet while his grandeur, his court and his colourful sex life were on display, his true intentions lay hidden.

A Gambling Man is a portrait of Charles II, exploring his elusive nature through the lens of these ten vital years – and a portrait of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world, in which the risks the king took forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.

Courtiers

Faber and Faber 2010, Hardcover, 432 pages, £9.95

Courtiers, by Lucy Worsley

From Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, a hugely engaging book about the men and women who lived and worked at Kensington Palace.

Ambitious and talented people flocked to court in search of power and prestige, but Kensington Palace was also a gilded cage. While its inhabitants were cocooned in comfort and splendour, successful courtiers had level heads and cold hearts; their secrets were never safe. Among them, a Vice Chamberlain with many vices, a Maid of Honour with a secret marriage, a pushy painter, an alcoholic equerry, a Wild Boy, a penniless poet, a dwarf comedian, two mysterious turbaned Turks and any number of discarded royal mistresses.

An eye-opening portrait of an enthralling group of royal servants, Courtiers also throws new light on the dramatic lives of George II and Queen Caroline: a lover murdered, babies snatched, horrific illnesses and tearful deathbed reconciliations.

Molotov’s Magic Lantern, by Rachel Polonsky

A writer explores a country and its culture in a luminous, original and unforgettable book.

In the 1990s Rachel Polonsky went to live in Moscow with her family, and began a journey of discovery into a country she thought she knew well. She lived in an apartment block on Romanov Street that had, in Tsarist and Soviet times, been a residence of the elite; and one of those ghostly neighbours was Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s henchman and arch survivor of that ferocious regime. (Marshal Budenny, hero of the civil war, and Marshal Konev, conqueror of Berlin, also lived there; Leon Trotsky was carried out of the building by the secret police when he was first sent into exile).

In Molotov’s former apartment, Rachel Polonsky discovered what remained of his library. And she learned that Molotov – ruthless apparatchik, joint author of the collectivisations and the Great Purge – was an ardent bibliophile, an eager reader with a particular devotion to Chekhov. He had all the classics; and he owned signed first editions of books by writers he later sent to the Gulag.

The library and the building in which Rachel Polonsky found it are at the heart of the book, the prism through which she looked at Russian history and at Russia as it is under Putin, and she kept returning to it in her journeys around Russia in search of the places associated with the writers in the library and with the politicians and soldiers who had lived in the Romanov house. At first she walked the streets around the Kremlin, writing about Moscow’s buildings and churches, its old bath houses and vanished aristocratic families, about Pushkin and the Decembrists, then widening her search to the towns and artists’ colonies in the region around the capital. Later she went from the far south to the high Arctic, from St Petersburg in the west to the border with Mongolia in the east.

In each place she encountered the past of a country ravaged by war, famine, genocide and totalitarianism, but also the legacy of Russia’s writers: their airy humanism, their tortured insights and nationalist fantasies, their epic responses to war and terror, their commitment to spiritual values and to natural science – a great and contradictory culture that continues to haunt the rest of the world.

Contested Will, by James Shapiro

From the bestselling and prize-winning author of 1599, an investigation of one of the most contentious issues in English history: who did write Shakespeare’s plays? And why does it matter so much to us?

For two hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, no one thought to argue that somebody else had written his plays. Since then dozens of rival candidates – including Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford – have been proposed as their true author. Contested Will unravels the mystery of when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote the plays, among them such leading writers and artists as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Orson Welles and Sir Derek Jacobi.

Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s fascinating search for the source of this controversy retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity, bald-faced deception and a failure to grasp what could not be imagined. If Contested Will does not end the authorship question once and for all, it will nonetheless irrevocably change the nature of the debate by confronting what is really contested: are the plays and poems of Shakespeare autobiographical and, if so, do they hold the key to the question of who wrote them?

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All in the Best Possible Taste

Simon & Schuster Ltd 2010, Paperback, 384 pages, £4.98

Television past, as LP Hartley might have once said, is another country. And, in the early 1980s it certainly was a different beast. There were still only three channels to watch; the evening’s programmes finished with the playing of the national anthem; and the biggest prize on TV was not Chris Tarrant’s million pounds but a speedboat on Bullseye…

But as Tom Bromley suggests in this funny and warming memoir, all that was about to change: The 1980s saw the end of the original golden era of television, and the beginnings of TV as we know it today. In 1982, Channel 4 became the first new terrestrial channel for almost twenty years and by the end of the decade, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television was vying to become Britain’s first multi-channel provider. The result of all this was that slowly but surely, British viewers had more choice than ever before and the cost of this choice was the erosion of television as a shared national event.

And no-one felt this change more deeply than Tom Bromley. Television played a large part in Tom’s childhood. His first word was ‘two’, as in BBC Two, and his earliest childhood memory is seeing Johnny Ball at a church fete. With great humour and affection, Tom Bromley tells the story of a childhood spent with his three siblings and that other all-important family member; the television set.

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Parrot and Olivier in America

Faber and Faber 2010, Hardcover, 464 pages, £10.78

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