FICTION
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
Sweet Caress is a rattling good “what will happen next?” story and, on another level, a meditation, on women and the lens. It opens with a lonely old woman recalling her life as a world-class photographer. She is living out her last years on the west coast of Scotland. She has not long to go. Amory Clay, born in 1908, spurns Oxford to become a Tatler-style fashion photographer. She then takes off to Weimar Germany to photograph its lesbian club life. She puts the pictures on display in London and is duly prosecuted for obscenity. Covering a Blackshirt march in the East End she is savagely kicked in the womb. Once recovered, it’s off to America to work in the glossy magazine industry. She takes lovers — rich, sophisticated men of the world. They are her conquests. The story continues into the Second World War and beyond. “Caress” is just the right word for the feel of this novel. Boyd deals with heavy themes with the lightest touch.
John Sutherland
Bloomsbury, 449pp, £7.99. To receive this book for a discounted price, call 0845 2712134 or visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
JK Rowling’s third novel as Robert Galbraith is all about legs — or, rather, the lack of them. Our hero, the private eye Cormoran Strike, had one of his blown off while serving in Afghanistan. Career of Evil begins when his feisty female sidekick Robin Ellacott receives a parcel with the severed leg of a young woman. The plot is strewn with characters whose desire it is to have a leg amputated. Other bits of the body play a part, as does sexual violence, but it’s legs that dominate. The crimes in Career of Evil may be far more gory than in The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, the villainous behaviour nastier and the depths of depravity deeper. Yet in spite of all the blood and mental cruelty, the reader does not turn the last page disgusted or disturbed. In an afterword, Rowling writes: “I can’t remember ever enjoying writing a novel more than Career of Evil.” It shows, and that enjoyment is passed on to the reader.
Marcel Berlins
Sphere, 579pp, £7.99. To receive this book for a discounted price, call 0845 2712134 or visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
NONFICTION
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The Secret War by Max Hastings
The great shaken-but-not-stirred mythology of the cunning British spy, cultivated by thriller writers, has been swallowed whole by the KGB training academy, the Iranian Vaja and the Chinese Ministry of Security. If only these foreign spymasters could be given the chance to study Max Hastings’s The Secret War in which our intrepid agents though often brave are more frequently duffers. Hastings gives them short shrift. Eddie Chapman, “Agent Zigzag”, did little more than keep himself “in girls and shoe leather”. Accounts of the women agents of the Special Operations Executive working undercover in occupied France “contain large doses of romantic twaddle”. And Kim Philby, well, he was a traitor, pure and simple. Hastings is a realist; not a single sentimental whimper slinks into these 600 pages. His measure of military intelligence is how far it influences outcomes on the battlefield. And it is through this prism that he retells the history of the Second World War.
Roger Boyes
William Collins, 612pp, £9.99. To receive this book for a discounted price, call 0845 2712134 or visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop
Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die by Ann Treneman
For three years The Times’s chief theatre critic Ann Treneman spent almost all of her spare time in graveyards. “You may think that a little strange and I might have too at some point. But that was when I thought graveyards were about death,” she says. “Now, having wandered around scores in my quest to find the 100 best graves in Britain, I am quite certain that graveyards are actually about life.” Treneman has written a guide to “graving” in GB. The result is a mixture of travelogue, biography and social history as she finds the resting places of the great and the good from Horatio Nelson to Marc Bolan, Byron’s dog Boatswain to the inventor of Cluedo Anthony E Pratt. It’s dead good.
Fiona Wilson
Biteback, 307pp, £10.99. To receive this book for a discounted price, call 0845 2712134 or visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop