the times | Saturday December 4 2021 saturday review 21
bestsellers
Paperback Fiction
1 (1) Snow John Banville
Faber £8.992 (2) The Manningtree Witches
AK Blakemore
Granta £8.99
3 (4) The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman
Penguin £8.99
4 (3) Dune Frank Herbert
Hodder £9.99
5 (5) It Ends With Us
Colleen Hoover
Simon & Schuster £8.99
6 (6)The Love Hypothesis
Ali Hazelwood
Sphere £8.99
7 (7) The Seven Husbands of Evelyn
Hugo Taylor Jenkins Reid
Simon & Schuster £8.99
8 (8)The Midnight Library
Matt Haig Canongate £8.99
9 (9)The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Bloomsbury £9.99
10 (10)Ugly Love Colleen Hoover
Simon & Schuster £8.99Hardback Non-fiction
1 (2) And Away... Bob Mortimer
Simon & Schuster £202 (1) Windswept & Interesting: My
Autobiography Billy Connolly
Two Roads £25
3 (4)The Storyteller: Tales of Life
and Music Dave Grohl
Simon & Schuster £20
4 (3)Private Eye Annual: 2021
Ian Hislop
Private Eye Productions £9.99
5 (5)Guinness World Records 2022
Guinness World Records £20
6
(new)Mental Fitness
Ant Middleton
HarperCollins £20
7 (10)Celebrating the Seasons with
the Yorkshire Shepherdess
Amanda Owen Macmillan £20
8 (8)The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present
Paul McCartney Allen Lane £75
9 (6)This Much Is True
Miriam Margolyes
John Murray £20
10 (9)Diddly Squat Jeremy Clarkson
Michael Joseph £16.991
(new)Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone
Diana Gabaldon Century £202 (1) Better Off Dead
Lee Child, Andrew Child
Bantam £20
3 (3) The Man Who Died Twice
Richard Osman
Viking £18.99
4
(new)Wish You Were Here
Jodi Picoult
Hodder & Stoughton £16.99
5 (2) Never Ken Follett
Macmillan £20
6 (4)The Promise
Damon Galgut
Chatto & Windus £16.99
7 (8) Sharpe’s Assassin
Bernard Cornwell
HarperCollins £20
8 (6)Silverview John le Carré
Viking £20
9 (7)The Cat Who Saved Books
Sosuke Natsukawa
Picador £9.99
10 (9)Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney Faber £16.99Hardback Fiction
1 (2) The Power of Geography
Tim Marshall
Elliott & Thompson £9.99
2 (1) Fifty Words for Snow
Nancy Campbell
Elliott & Thompson £9.99
3 (3) Empireland: How Imperialism
Has Shaped Modern Britain
Sathnam Sanghera Viking £9.99
4 (4)Best of Matt 2021
Matt Pritchett
Seven Dials £8.995 (5)Entangled Life
Merlin Sheldrake
Vintage £10.99
6 (6)English Pastoral
James Rebanks Penguin £9.99
7 (7) The Wild Silence
Raynor Winn Penguin £9.99
8 (8)The White Ship Charles Spencer
William Collins £9.99
9 (—)Agent Sonya
Ben Macintyre
Penguin £8.99
10 (—)Giles The Collection 2022
Carl Giles Hamlyn £9.99Paperback Non-fiction
THE NUMBER IN PARENTHESES REPRESENTS CHART POSITIONS LAST WEEK. DATA SUPPLIED BY WATERSTONES FOR THE WEEK ENDING NOVEMBER 27audiobook
of the
we ek
The Power of the Dog by
Thomas Savage, read by
Chad Michael Collins
and Annie Proulx,
Penguin, 8hr 21min
Do justice to Thomas
Savage and Jane Campion
by listening to the
audiobook version of The
Power of the Dog before
you see the film. Chad
Michael Collins tells the
story of two rancher
brothers with laconic
sensitivity, bringing out
Savage’s lyrical sensitivity
to the Montana setting
and his acute perception
of the ugly impact of
primitive experience on
the men who toiled to
master the wilderness in
the first quarter of the
20th century.
The icing on the cake is
hearing Annie Proulx’s
croaky, forthright voice as
she lauds this “brilliant
and tough” book to the
skies in her afterword,
written to introduce a
2009 edition and perhaps
Campion’s inspiration.
Savage’s life shows
where the book, published
in 1967, came from: he
was an eastern boy
toughened up by life on
his stepfather’s ranch,
with a step-uncle on
whom the Cain-like Phil
was modelled. Touching
with elegant delicacy on
the theme that Proulx
explored in her 1997 short
story Brokeback Mountain,
Savage threads his
narrative with allusions
that you will only fully
appreciate if you read
it twice.
Christina Hardyment
The Little Prince
(3+) by Louise
Greig, based on the
novel by Antoine
de Saint-Exupéry,
illustrated by
Sarah Massini
Farshore, 32pp;
£10.99While studying philosophy A-level 30
years ago, I tried to read Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince to my
three-year-old niece. Poor thing. Her
patience ran thin after a few pages and
she made it clear that the existentialist
parable I was so keen on was not yet
for her. We switched to The Tiger Who
Came to Tea.
It may seem odd to abridge and
rewrite a story that was relatively slim
to start with when it was published in- Yet, reading this elegant picture
book version for younger children, it
makes a lot of sense, and I quite wish
I’d had it all those years ago. Rather
like the prince and his rose, Louise
Greig, a poet who wrote the Kate
Greenaway medal-nominated Sweep,
and Sarah Massini, who illustrated The
Velveteen Rabbit and Star in the Jar, are
the dream team.
“I lived my life alone in the clouds.
Until the day my plane crashed in the
empty desert,” Greig begins. “Stranded,
with only my shadow, I sank down in
the sand, and in the deep silence Islept.” We see the pilot burrowed in a
dune with the rusty plane stalled in
the sand.
The Little Prince appears — wearing
a star T-shirt and orange trousers,
straight out of the Boden catalogue.
He asks the man to draw him a sheep,
and so the familiar tale unfolds as he
learns of the prince’s planet with its
sprouting baobabs (hence his need for a
sheep). The scenes in which the prince
recalls his rose are touching all over
again: “Her perfume filled his planet.
Her beauty blazed like the flame of a
lamp. She shone a light in the little
prince’s heart.” It’s never too soon to
hear that we don’t know what we’ve
got till it’s gone, and this pair (and the
spirit of Saint-Exupéry) land that
message in style.children’s book
of the week
Alex O’Connell says a
new Little Prince will
enchant little ones