NONFICTION
How to Speak Money by John Lanchester
Max Planck, the man who cracked quantum physics, once told John Maynard Keynes that in his youth he thought of studying economics, but found it too difficult. And that’s well before the days of a derivative called a vanilla mezzanine RMBS synthetic CDO. What hope, then, for ordinary mortals? The language of money, John Lanchester says, is genuinely complicated; the gap between those who speak it and those who don’t is vast. But once deciphered, de-obfuscated, it’s easy and fascinating to understand. Hence this vivid, irreverent crammer containing everything anyone who ever skipped the business pages should know. Melanie Reid
How to Speak Money by John Lanchester, Faber, 286pp, £9.99. To buy this book for £9.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Coming Up Trumps by Jean Trumpington
Ah, Trumpers. Even the name Baroness Trumpington of Sandwich is magnificent. Jean Trumpington calls herself “rather dull” but she can’t help entertaining everyone. Life can never be taken too seriously — “if you do things with no humour, you lose,” she writes. My favourite moment in her memoirs is at the final prize giving at the Leys School in Cambridge where her husband was retiring as headmaster. For 17 years her role had been to stand meekly behind her man handing him the cups and trophies. Suddenly in front of all the parents she took a running leap and jumped into the swimming pool to thunderous applause from the boys. Alice Thomson
Coming Up Trumps by Jean Trumpington, Pan Macmillan, 234pp, £7.99. To buy this book for £7.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
FICTION
The Farm by Tom Rob Smith
Tom Rob Smith’s The Farm is an absorbing, unsettling, multilayered novel, very different from his best-selling Child 44. The main narrator, Daniel, lives an unsatisfactory life in London; he’s lacked the courage to tell his parents he’s in a gay relationship. They have retired to an isolated farm in Sweden, his mother’s native land. Daniel receives a phone call from his father, telling him that she’s gone mad, and has been in an asylum. His mother then warns him not to believe his father, a liar and a wicked man. She’s left the asylum and is coming to London with the evidence. She tells her son of mysterious deaths, disappearances, conspiracies and trolls. Daniel is distressed — all his comforting assumptions and memories about his family have been destroyed. But which of his parents can he believe? The Farm is beautifully crafted, its effect enhanced by the author’s admission that his own family had faced a similar experience. Marcel Berlins
The Farm by Tom Rob Smith, Bantam, 320pp, £20. To buy this book for £7.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
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Some Luck by Jane Smiley
Some Luck is the first volume of a projected trilogy to be entitled The Last Hundred Years. It’s at once a modest project, an everyday story of country folk set in the American Midwest, and an immensely ambitious one, a century of American experience filtered through one family’s interwoven stories. In embarking on it, Jane Smiley — one of America’s most highly regarded novelists, is setting herself up in competition with John Updike, with his great sequence of novels about the small-town everyman, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. This a quietly written book, nothing flash about it, but it takes on the big subjects — from love to mortality — and meets them with steady strength. Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Some Luck by Jane Smiley, Picador, 623pp, £7.99. To buy this book for £7.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134