the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GR saturday review 21
audiobook
of the week
bestsellers
Paperback Fiction
1
(new)Firewatching
Russ Thomas
Simon & Schuster £8.99
2 (4) A Single Thread
Tracy Chevalier
Borough £8.99
3 (3) Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens Corsair £8.99
4
(new)Starve Acre
Andrew Michael Hurley
John Murray £8.99
5 (1) Pine Francine Toon
Black Swan £8.99
6 (8)Those Who Are Loved
Victoria Hislop
Headline Review £8.99
7 (6) The Guest List
Lucy Foley
HarperCollins £8.99
8 (2)The Girl with the Louding Voice
Abi Daré Sceptre £8.99
9 (5)Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo
Penguin £8.99
10 (9)The Beekeeper of Aleppo
Christy Lefteri Manilla £8.99Hardback Nonfiction
1 (1) How Animals Saved My Life:
Being the Supervet
Noel Fitzpatrick Trapeze £20
2 (7)Guinness World Records 2021
Guinness World Records £20
3 (6)Private Eye Annual 2020
Ian Hislop
Private Eye Productions £9.99
4
(new)Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a
Scottish Adventure Like No Other
Sam Heughan, Graham McTavish
Hodder & Stoughton £205 (2)Women Don’t Owe You Pretty
Florence Given Cassell £12.99
6 (9)A Del of a Life
David Jason Century £20
7 (—)A Life on Our Planet
David Attenborough
Ebury £20
8 (8)Mountains According to G
Geraint Thomas Quercus £16.99
9
(new)We Do Lockdown
Miriam Elia
Dung Beetle £8.99
10 (—)My Garden World
Monty Don Two Roads £201 (1) The Sentinel
Lee and Andrew Child
Bantam £20
2 (3) The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman
Viking £14.99
3 (2) Troy Stephen Fry
Michael Joseph £20
4 (4)One August Night
Victoria Hislop
Headline Review £14.99
5 (8) A Song for the Dark Times
Ian Rankin Orion £20
6 (5)Ghosts Dolly Alderton
Fig Tree £14.99
7 (6) The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
Canongate £16.998 (9)War Lord Bernard Cornwell
HarperCollins £20
9 (—)Troubled Blood
Robert Galbraith
Sphere £2010 (10)Hidden in Plain Sight
Jeffrey Archer
Macmillan £20Hardback Fiction
1
(new)The Art of Rest
Claudia Hammond
Canongate £9.99
2 (2)The Body: A Guide for Occupants
Bill Bryson
Black Swan £9.99
3 (3) The Salt Path
Raynor Winn Penguin £9.99
4 (1) A Cheesemonger’s History of
The British Isles
Ned Palmer Profile £9.99
5 (5)Tall Tales and Wee Stories
Billy Connolly Two Roads £8.99
6 (7)Three Women
Lisa Taddeo Bloomsbury £9.99
7 (—)Best of Matt 2020
Matt Pritchett Seven Dials £7.99
8 (9)Between the Stops
Sandi Toksvig
Little, Brown £9.99
9 (8)The Secret Barrister: Stories of
the Law and How It’s Broken
Picador £9.9910 (4)Surrounded by Idiots
Thomas Erikson
Vermilion £9.99Paperback Nonfiction
THE NUMBER IN PARENTHESES REPRESENTS CHART POSITIONS LAST WEEK. DATA SUPPLIED BY WATERSTONES FOR THE WEEK ENDING NOVEMBER 7The Peregrine by
JA Baker, read by
David Attenborough,
William Collins, 8hr
56min; £12.99
No one could be more
hail-fellow-well-met than
David Attenborough.
At 94, he reads his
bestselling new book A
Life on Our Planet, part
autobiography, part plea
for conserving the Earth,
with the measured
aplomb of a man who is
master of himself and the
universe. His narration of
The Peregrine (1967) is
altogether more elegiac:
think archdeacon
intoning in a candlelit
chancel.
The Essex author
JA Baker was a lover of
solitude and wildness,
whose knack of conveying
the natural world in
unexpected but strikingly
apt phrases has made him
immortal. He identified
deeply with peregrines,
both falcons (the females)
and tiercels (the smaller
males), which he observed
on an east coast river
estuary over ten years.
The Peregrine tells of
watching them between
October and April. The
hawks learnt to accept
him to such a degree that
in the final moments of
the book he arrives only
five yards from a tiercel.
It gazes unseeingly past
him. “The noble head
lowers... he is resigning
his savagery to the night
that rises round us like
dark water. The great
eyes look into mine.”
Breathtaking.
Christina Hardyment
This is magic, in
words and pictures,
says Alex O’Connell
The Ickabog(7+) by JK
Rowling, Little Brown,
284pp; £20
JK Rowling originally
wrote this story more
than ten years ago, for
her children when they
were little. She filed the
manuscript away in her attic, but thenretrieved, edited it and posted it chapter
by chapter on her website during
lockdown. Rowling, below, asked readers
to send in illustrations for an eventual
publication. The winners, as chosen by
her team, have been included in
this beautiful hardback
published this week (with a
slightly less beautiful price
tag to match).
The Ickabog sits
somewhere between
fairytale, fable and
political allegory. Harry
Potter fans should not
expect hidden references to
that world. The only crossover
is Rowling’s continued ability to tell
a story. Her imagination is a marvel
and her plotting ever-sophisticatedin what could otherwise be deemed
a simple tale.
She takes us to the epicurean world
of Cornucopia, ruled by King Fred the
Fearless and made up of various cities
including Chouxville (the pastry
capital and home of the king),
Kurdsburg (the cheese
centre), Baronstown
(meatsville) and the
Marshlands (a place
of “tasteless rubbery
mushrooms and thin dry
grass”). Fred is weak and
led by his two Machiavellian
advisers, Spittleworth and
Flapoon (I couldn’t possibly say
if they resemble Cummings or Cain).
They use the “myth” of the Ickabog, a
green hairy creature thought to live inthe Marshlands, to manipulate the king
and over-tax the Cornucopians.
When Flapoon shoots the father of
Bert Beamish, a sweet townsboy —
claiming he died at the claws of the
Ickabog — and locks up the father of
Bert’s best friend Daisy Dovetail, it’s up
to the two children to discover the truth
about the Ickabog, spring the other kids
from Ma Grunter’s orphanage and bring
kindness back to the land.
The illustrations — a large number
are from India, Britain and New
Zealand — are thrilling, well chosen
and a breath of fresh air. It’s hard to put
an age range on this book which, if read
aloud, could captivate children of four
or five, but will be lapped up especially
by seven to ten-year-olds and entranced
this 47-year-old.children’s book
of the week