Enjoy Life

Winter books

In need of a new year pick-me-up? Simon Evans rounds up the latest crop of great reads

One Life (Robinson, £10.99) is the book by Barbara Winton that inspired the film of the same name, telling the remarkable true story of her father, Sir Nicholas Winton, who rescued 669 children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938, as the world braced itself for another war…

Former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino believes everything is possible, be it in life or work, and he shares the lessons he has learned during a successful career achieved against the odds in Moonshot (Piatkus, £16.99)…

Country life in the Kent countryside can be anything but idyllic, as Daisy, a mother of twins, discovers in Holly Hepburn’s novel Return to Half Moon Farm (Simon and Schuster, £9.99); The Widow’s Choice (Arrow, £8.99) is a stand-alone spin-off from Nancy Revell’s Shipyard Girls series of novels, following Angie as she marries her sweetheart Quentin and moves into Cuthford Manor, and The Lost Girl (Zaffre, £8.99), is the latest absorbing saga from Rosie Goodwin, following the story of a couple of children who are taken in by their cold, unfeeling grandfather following the sudden passing of their parents…

In The Trials of Marjorie Crowe, by CS Robertson (Hodder, £20), mysterious deaths throw suspicion on an enigmatic resident of Kilgoyne, in Scotland. No one is quite sure of the woman’s age, whether she’s a spinster or divorced, and if she was once a pharmacist, librarian or witch. One thing’s for sure, she has a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a well-crafted, involving read…

James Patterson’s novel Holmes, Margaret and Poe (Century, £20) focuses on a hugely successful New York-based detective agency of the same name, run by Brendan Holmes, Margaret Marple and Auguste Poe. There are mysteries aplenty, not least the real identities of the sleuths in question…

The Fatal Alliance, by David Thomson (Harper, £25), is a penetrating, in-depth study of how war has been portrayed on film, and The Cameraman, by Matthew Kneale (Atlantic, £9.99) is a thought-provoking road trip through the rapidly changing Europe of the Thirties…

In Fifty Years of the Concept Album (Bloomsbury Academic), Eric Wolfson explores the evolution of the themed-LP, from The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper up to Green Day and Kendrick Lamar. Wolfson is especially insightful when discussing those landmarks of the genre, Days of Future Passed, by The Moody Blues, and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon…

Life’s Work (Picador, £9.99) is the unflinching, confessional autobiography from David Milch, writer for the TV shows Deadwood and NYPD Blue. Written as he descends into the twilight world of dementia it reflects on both his ever more strange present and often painful past, and A Short History of the Tudors (£14.99), the latest entry in Bloomsbury Academic’s excellent Short Histories series, finds Richard Rex taking a refreshingly different look at one of the most fascinating and turbulent periods in British history…

Now the subject of a major Netflix series, Fernando J Munez’s period novel The Cook of Castamar (Head of Zeus, £25) is now available in English for the first time. It tells of how a young cook and a powerful duke are drawn together through grief, but become the target of political plots and personal vendettas…

In Ruth Mancini’s gripping novel The Woman on the Ledge (Century, £14.99) Tate, a single, out-of-work actor working as a temp for a London bank, is arrested after a woman falls to her death from the institution’s 25th-floor roof terrace. Tate, who was with the woman just before her death, claims she is being framed but it eventually becomes apparent she has her secrets – as did the woman who died…

An unorthodox ex-cop is called in to investigate a criminal organisation targeting Midwestern towns in Thomas Perry’s Murder Book (Grove Press, £9.99), and in Shelly Burr’s new Australian-set novel Murder Town (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) a serial killer’s crimes return to haunt a community forever stained by its history…

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