THE
SUNDAY
TIMES
BESTSELLERS
GENERAL HARDBACKS
Last
weekWeeks in
top 101
Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
Julie Smith
(M Joseph £16.99)
Clinical psychologist’s advice for
navigating life’s ups and downs
(6,455)1162
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse/Charlie
Mackesy (Ebury £16.99) An illustrated
fable containing gentle life philosophy (2.015)31333
Freezing Order/Bill Browder
(Simon & Schuster £20) Uncovering Kremlin
criminality and life on the run from Putin (2,010)224
Manifest/Roxie Nafousi
(M Joseph £14.99) An introduction to the personal
development practice of manifestation (1,560)4165
Be Yourself and Happier/Will Young
(Ebury £14.99) The singer shares his life lessons
on how he navigated a breakdown (1,385)—16
Fabergé/Kieran McCarthy, Hanne Faurby et al
(V&A £40) The history and legacy of the House
of Fabergé (1,275)12 17
Super-Infinite/Katherine Rundell
(Faber £16.99) The extraordinary life of the English
poet, law scholar and cleric John Donne (1,200)928
Big Panda and Tiny Dragon/James Norbury
(M Joseph £14.99) Illustrated mindful tale of
friendship, inspired by Buddhist philosophy (1,195)5249
Taste/Stanley Tucci
(Fig Tree £20) A gastronomic journey through the
actor’s life in and out of the kitchen (995)6910
Preventable/Devi Sridhar
(Viking £20) An expert’s story of the global impact
of Covid-19 and what lessons we can learn (970)—1GENERAL PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
The Wim Hof Method
Wim Hof
(Rider & Co £8.99)
Dutch extreme athlete’s life story
and mind-over-matter philosophy
(5,300)322
The Power of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) A study of ten regions
that could define global politics in the future (3,060)5303
Happy Mind, Happy Life/Rangan Chatterjee
(Penguin Life £16.99) The GP shares cutting-edge
insights into the science of happiness (2,980)144
Putin’s People/Catherine Belton
(Wm Collins £9.99) How Putin and his KGB entourage
seized power in Russia and turned on the West (2,525)7125
Atomic Habits/James Clear
(Random House £16.99) The minuscule changes
that can grow into life-altering outcomes (2,440)8366
You Don’t Understand Me/Tara Porter
(Blink £14.99) An expert approach to coping with
the challenges faced by young women (2,045)11 17
Prisoners of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) Ten maps that tell you
all you need to know about geopolitics (2,010)13 1378
Good Vibes, Good Life/Vex King
(Hay House £10.99) How positive thinking, self-love
and overcoming fear lead to lasting happiness (1,990)2 1139
This Is Going to Hurt/Adam Kay
(Picador £8.99) A doctor turned comedian’s account
of what life was like on the NHS front line (1,905)6 13910
Lily’s Promise/Lily Ebert and Dov Forman
(Pan £8.99) Holocaust survivor’s story of her life
in Hungary and her time at Auschwitz (1,890)42BOOKS
Minna, flogged her with a
whip and told her she was
too ugly to interest men. Her
doctor father, William, doted
on her, but when gentlemen
friends visited he encouraged
her to perch on their knees. It
seemed natural for her to be
taken, at 14, for drives in the
Botanic Gardens with a family
friend, Mr Howard, who
groped her breasts and told
her they would live on a
distant island where she’d
obey his every whim.
In her 1979 memoir Smile
Please Rhys said that almost
from birth she had felt like
“an outsider; a changeling; a
ghostly revenant in the hard
light of day”. The women in
her stories and novels don’t fit
the worlds they inhabit either.
They are alienated, angry and
exploited, surviving by being
witty and tough-minded
(although perhaps too
dependent on drink). And in
her finest work, Wide Sargassoon the wall of the family’s
dining room. In her story
Heat, Rhys wrote, “I stared at
them all through meals, trying
to make sense of the shape.”
Gazing at the grotesque,
watching the onrush of
disaster, feeling fear in
domestic settings — all were
central to Rhys’s childhood. As
a white Creole (meaning
simply someone born on
Dominica) she was taunted by
locals as a “white cockroach”.
When carnival dancers arrived
in town, one shrieked at her
and poked a thick tongue
through his wire-mesh mask,
sending her running away,
crying. Her nursemaid, Meta,
terrified her with stories of
red-eyed women creeping into
children’s bedrooms at night
to suck their blood. Even in a
sunlit glade near the family
summer home she found
herself trembling with fear.
Her parents’ treatment
didn’t help. Her mother,BIOGRAPHY
John Walsh
I Used to Live Here Once
The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys
by Miranda Seymour
William Collins £25 pp448
The novelist Jean Rhys was a
nervous 11-year-old growing
up in the Caribbean island of
Dominica when, in August
1902, her mother woke her
up to show her a black cloud
spreading above the hills of
neighbouring Martinique.
Soon after the Mont Pelée
volcano erupted, showering
deadly burning ash on to the
capital, St Pierre, and its
40,000 inhabitants.
Rhys’s father went to
inspect the terrible sight, and
returned with souvenirs — two
brass church candlesticks
twisted into a hideous
contortion — which he hung
Sea (1966), Rhys took Bertha
Mason, the “madwoman in
the attic” in Jane Eyre, and
retold her story as Antoinette
Cosway, an independent-
minded, Creole mirror of Jane
— a real literary revenant.
Given her childhood, it was
understandable that Rhys was
delighted when her aunt
Clarice volunteered to take
her to England at 17. Dreaming
of becoming a great actress
like Sarah Bernhardt, she
showed promise in early stage
roles, but her lilting Creole
voice meant she would never
be a serious actress, and she
was called home. She refused
to go, and joined a touring
company as a chorus girl.
There follows a louche
chronicle of demimondaine
squalor, suave gentlemen,
grinding poverty, arty clubs
that opened at midnight,
rackety travels to Paris,
Vienna and London — in
prewar Chelsea she could befound dancing at the Crab
Tree Club beside Ezra Pound,
Walter Sickert and Dora
Carrington — and lots of sex.l It may be the final week of
the V&A’s Fabergé exhibition,
but the accompanying book
has just entered the bestseller
list — and at a whopping £40
that’s quite the achievement
for an art book.
l It is likely that we will be
seeing books about the
Covid-19 pandemic on these
pages for many years to
come. Devi Sridhar’s
Preventable is the latest to
make the list, and we reckon
Bill Gates’s upcoming book,
How to Prevent the Next
Pandemic, will be next.
The lists are prepared by and
the data is supplied by (and
copyrighted to) Nielsen BookScan,
and are taken from the TCM for
the week ending 23/04/22.
Figures shown are sales for
the seven-day period.
Kid Creole Rhys came from
Dominica to England aged 17This life of the Wide Sargasso Sea author Jean Rhys comes close to being a masterpiece
Whisky and lots of sex
24 1 May 2022