If you don’t fancy towing around hulking great hardbacks through this gloomy January, never fear: we’ve selected all the best paperbacks out this month. Slip one into your bag for the commute and make some headway with that New Year’s reading resolution. Well, it’s a virtuous time of year.
Fiction
Godmersham Park by Gill Hornby (Penguin, £9.99)
The intimate world of Jane Austen is brought to life, seen through the eyes of Anne Sharpe, who was governess to Fanny, daughter of Austen’s brother Edward. She is usually only glimpsed in the minutiae of Austen’s surviving letters but here Anne takes centre stage as she involves herself in the life of the Austen family. “Thanks to her close reading of Austen’s real correspondence, Gill Hornby has become an adept hand at faux Austen letters, even down to the odd habit of underlining unexpected words for comic effect,” wrote Austen scholar John Mullan, adding that “the research is impeccable”.
The Murder Book by Mark Billingham (Sphere, £8.99)
Someone is going to bed with men, killing them and leaving with body parts. DI Tom Thorne realises the arrested femme fatale is just a cat’s paw and that an evil genius is at work. “The sense of mounting dread would be unbearable were it not for Mark Billingham’s black humour,” wrote Times crime critic Mark Sanderson, who chose it as one of his favourite crime thrillers of 2022.
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (Picador, £9.99)
The A Little Life author doesn’t write small. Her third novel imagines America over three separate timelines — an alternative version of America in 1893, where same-sex marriage is legal and admired; in 1993 Aids-struck Manhattan; and in 2093, members of the same recurring family deal with perpetual pandemics and totalitarian rule, as well as affairs of the heart. “To Paradise is frequently magnificent, thanks to Hanya Yanagihara’s skill at immersing the reader deep within the emotional world of her characters, as they face agonising choices in the name of sexual and filial love. It is also perversely evasive and unsatisfactory, its narrative canvas overloaded,” wrote Claire Allfree.
● Times readers’ favourite books of 2022
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Yesterday’s Spy by Tom Bradby (Penguin, £8.99)
A disillusioned MI6 agent Harry Tower flies into Tehran in 1953 — just ahead of a covert CIA-backed coup — after hearing that his journalist son, Sean, has disappeared after exposing corruption in the Iranian government. This atmospheric thriller is the tenth novel by Tom Bradby, the anchor of ITV’s News at Ten.
Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman (Vintage, £8.99)
In Georgian London, orphan Pandora Blake lives in an antiques shop with villainous uncle Hezekiah. One day he takes delivery of a mysterious shipment, which he hides. Pandora, suspecting illicit activity, sniffs around and finds a beautiful Greek vase, which some say is cursed. An engaging debut full of romance, suspense, myth and conspiracy, wrote Antonia Senior.
The Cook by Ajay Chowdhury (Vintage, £8.99)
Kamil Rahman is a cook in a Brick Lane restaurant but he used to be a detective in Kolkata. Whenever trouble crops up, he still seems to find himself mixed up in it. When a young nurse is strangled, Rahman and his latest love interest Naila, who has fled her abusive husband in Lahore, think the police are on the wrong track. “The Cook lies towards the cosy end of the criminal spectrum” wrote Mark Sanderson. “But the identity of the killer comes as a real surprise.”
The Couple at the Table by Sophie Hannah (Hodder, £8.99)
A detective couple’s stay at a resort is interrupted when one of their fellow guests is fatally stabbed. Whodunnit? The events of the disastrous weekend are shown from the viewpoint of each guest, with Sophie Hannah bamboozling the reader by revealing ever more secrets and lies. “It’s great fun being taken up the garden path. There are clues and red herrings galore,” wrote Mark Sanderson.
Non-fiction
Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the war between the Windsors by Tom Bower (Blink, £10.99)
Forget the Netflix doc: up against Tom Bower, a biographer famous for unauthorised skewerings of the famous, Meghan’s controlled and carefully burnished image does not survive beyond page five. “His book depicts Meghan as a merciless opportunist who found in Harry the perfect vehicle for personal advancement” wrote Melanie Reid. “It’s an undeniably gripping read, but it’s also brutal and ultimately sad.”
Reality +:Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy by David J Chalmers (Allen Lane, £12.99)
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The metaverse, headsets, video games: soon, a lot of lives will be simulations. Will that render them utterly meaningless? David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, thinks not. Virtual realities are just as “genuine” as physical ones, he posits provocatively. The book is “a gripping act of philosophical escapology” wrote Kit Wilson, https://www.thetimes.com/article/reality-by-david-j-chalmers-review-j7cnf86m6 adding that it is “a sprawling, brain-tenderising beast of a book — but a hugely entertaining one at that.”
Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945 by Richard Overy (Penguin, £18.99)
What caused the Second World War? The hunger for imperial booty from Germany, Italy and Japan who missed out on the earlier scramble for colonies. “It is through the prism of this final dynamic drive to empire,” Richard Overy argues, “that the long-term origins of the Second World War can best be understood.” This is the thesis of this whopping, fact-packed grand overview. “Overy has written many fine books, but Blood and Ruins is his masterpiece,” wrote the historian Saul David. “At almost 1,000 pages, it puts all previous single-volume works of the conflict in the shade.”
Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionise Your Sleep and Health by Russell Foster (Penguin Life, £10.99)
Listen to the tick-tock of your body clock is the message of this study of the science of sleep by Russell Foster, professor of sleep and circadian neuroscience at Oxford University. Tom Whipple in his review said: “Foster’s book is an odd but compelling mix. At times it is very entertaining; at others a practical self-help guide. Sometimes it is a scientific Q&A. It is rigorous without being academic, fun without being facile.”
Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough (Profile, £10.99)
Britain is the money-laundering capital of the world, a reputation that appears even more shameful since the Russian invasion of Ukraine showed how much dirty oligarch money has sloshed around. Oliver Bullough describes in great detail how Britain — or rather the City and its accountants, lawyers and financiers — has become a butler to kleptocrats, “an amoral enabler for hire” for “some of the worst people in existence”. A “highly readable but thoroughly depressing book”, wrote Simon Nixon.
Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City by Andrea Elliott (Penguin, £10.99)
Poverty, homelessness, violence, addiction — so not the cheeriest read but one so powerful it won its author a Pulitzer prize last year. New York Times journalist Andrea Elliott first met 11-year-old Dasani Coates when she was living in a homeless shelter in New York. The book follows eight years in Coates’s life as she tries to struggle free from poverty. Everyday life seems stacked against her in this “magnificent work”, according to Christina Patterson.
The Greatest Raid — St Nazaire, 1942: The Heroic Story of Operation Chariot by Giles Whittell (Penguin, £10.99)
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Operation Chariot, the British commando raid on the French port of St Nazaire on March 28, 1942, was one of the most romantic and foolhardy missions dreamt up by Winston Churchill in his long, reckless life. Giles Whittell tells the story of the suicide mission with aplomb, providing achingly detailed portraits of these men who risked and lost their lives. In his review, Gerard DeGroot compared the book to the Benzedrine the troops were encouraged to take before battle, writing “it’s a gloriously exciting high, followed by a crushing realisation”.
Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People by Rick Gekoski (Constable, £9.99)
Dealing in rare books isn’t for softies. Veteran dealer and late-flowering novelist Rick Gekoski gives a witty insight into his trade, a world where Sylvia Plath’s marginalia can drive people to fits of intense jealousy. “Gekoski, a fine raconteur, does for bibliomania what James Herriot once did for pets and farm animals. As his previous books, such as Tolkien’s Gown, remind us he has a wealth of quirky and diverting stories, and you feel he could keep entertaining his readers for ever,” wrote reviewer Roger Lewis.
Culloden: Battle & Aftermath by Paul O’Keeffe (Vintage, £12.99)
The 1746 battle of Culloden still gets politicians excited. It marked the end of the Jacobite cause and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempt to seize the throne. There have been many accounts of this emotive, romanticised chapter in history, the last time a full-scale battle was fought on British soil. “John Prebble’s classic 1967 account is still the best,” wrote Saul David. “But what Paul O’Keeffe brings to the party is a focus as much on what happened next as on the fighting. O’Keeffe has trawled archives and contemporary accounts, particularly newspapers, to give us a front-row view of the drama.”
The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World by Edward Shawcross (Faber, £12.99)
In this tragi-comic piece of history, Ferdinand Maximilian, the “spare” brother of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, was appointed emperor of Mexico, after some geopolitical jiggery-pokery by the French. But Mexico itself was divided top to bottom by civil war, so that when naive Maximilian arrived, he became embroiled in a conflict that soon led to his death by firing squad, at the age of 34, in 1867. This grim scene was captured by Edouard Manet’s Execution of Maximilian. Reviewer Paul Lay praised “Edward Shawcross’s gripping, detailed telling” of how it took just 18 months for Maximilian’s Mexican empire to shrink to the size of a condemned man’s cell and disappear in a puff of gunsmoke.
The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin, £12.99)
We live in a meritocracy, don’t we? No, says the Economist journalist Adrian Wooldridge, we live in a pluto-meritocracy in which the rich use their wealth to buy educational privileges for their children, guaranteeing them a place at the top of society. Wooldridge shows how a relatively novel idea — promotion on merit, rather than birth or connections — took hold in the 19th century and how the meritocratic revolution over time has created “an aristocracy of talent”, an elite that keeps newcomers out. James Marriott described it as an “erudite, thoughtful and magnificently entertaining book”.
This Mortal Coil: A History of Death by Andrew Doig (Bloomsbury, £10.99)
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This (mainly) fascinating history of death is actually rather upbeat, concluded reviewer Robbie Millen. This Mortal Coil records how what humans die of has changed dramatically over the centuries — and how medical science has diminished many of the threats to us. Each chapter looks at a cause of death, ranging from scurvy to car safety, alcoholism (thank vodka for a Russian male life expectancy of 59) to yellow fever (30,000 still die from it every year). Of course, there is plenty of plague too. (During the Black Death in the 14th century up to 60 per cent of Europe’s population died.) As for the future, Doig, a professor of biochemistry, optimistically speculates that with DNA-editing, “we could have hearts like Usain Bolt and lungs like Serena Williams”.
