Doubleday £14.99 pp323
It is hard not to believe in the reality of family curses when Liza Campbell writes about her truly extraordinary childhood. Liza’s father, Hugh, was the 25th Thane of Cawdor, and she was the last child to be born at Cawdor Castle — the sinister, Scots-gothic pile that features in Macbeth, family seat of the Campbell clan since the year dot. Hugh was handsome and charismatic, and the trouble seems to have started when he came into his inheritance of 100,000 acres and three huge houses. He flipped into profligacy and madness, drank and took drugs, had countless affairs and was incredibly nasty to his wife and children — there is a particularly distressing description of Hugh tormenting Liza’s five-year-old sister. Campbell tells the wild, sorry tale with a sharp, offhand wit, and a genuine desire to explore the reasons for her father’s decline and fall.
MOSTLY WOMEN: A Photographer’s Life
by Michael Ward
Granta £30 pp356
Michael Ward took photographs for The Sunday Times for more than 30 years, and the pictures that illustrate this memoir are spectacular — famous faces, so fresh and immediate, so intimate and revealing that they leap off the page. He includes his portraits of Mia Farrow (“such eyes!”), Sarah Miles looking youthful and vulnerable, Vanessa Redgrave looking like a warrior princess and a surprisingly sultry Billie Whitelaw. But this is no coffee-table book — the greatest fascination lies in the text. Ward’s parents were theatrical types who sent him to boarding school, aged three. When he was a teenager, his mother seduced him. He has been married five times, with entanglements and conquests in between. Yes, this is a man who “loves” women — you wouldn’t be married to him — but the book is gorgeous, both to look at and to read.
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UNACCOMPANIED WOMEN: Late-Life Adventures in Love, Sex and Real Estate
by Jane Juska
Chatto £12.99 pp253
Jane Juska came late to fame. At the age of 66, she placed her now-legendary ad in a New York lonely hearts column: “Before I turn 67 — next March — I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like.” The results became her bestselling book, A Round-Heeled Woman, and Juska found herself a somewhat unwilling spokesperson for the women the sexual revolution forgot; the poor old things gathering dust on the shelf. This is volume two, in which Juska continues her musings on gender politics. She has some sad tales to tell, especially of her own breaking heart, but she is also very, very funny about the unending bedroom farce of the post-monogamous generation — how is a lady supposed to fancy a beau who looks like Deputy Dawg?