FICTION HARDBACKS
Last
weekWeeks in
top 101
Young Mungo
Douglas Stuart
(Picador £16.99)
The relationship between two teenage
boys is threatened by the sectarian divide
(6,670)222
Lessons in Chemistry/Bonnie Garmus
(Doubleday £14.99) In 1960s America, a chemist
becomes the star of a popular TV cooking show (4,015)333
Storm Tide/Wilbur Smith and Tom Harper
(Zaffre £20) Three generations of the Courtney family
fight on opposing sides of a brutal war (3,485)424
Dream Town/David Baldacci
(Macmillan £20) Aloysius Archer heads to Hollywood
to hunt for a killer and a missing client (2,985)725
The No-Show/Beth O’Leary
(Quercus £14.99) Three women have been stood up
on Valentine’s Day, all by the same man (2,075)526
The Man Who Died Twice/Richard Osman
(Viking £18.99) Stolen diamonds worth £20 million
cause chaos for the Thursday Murder Club (1,755)8327
With This Kiss/Carrie Hope Fletcher
(HQ £12.99) A young woman rejects love after
discovering her kiss reveals a person’s death (1,470)628
Again, Rachel/Marian Keyes
(M Joseph £20) Successful and nearing 50, Rachel
Walsh has her life upended by an old flame (1,440)12 99
Amongst Our Weapons/Ben Aaronovitch
(Gollancz £18.99) Detective Peter Grant probes
a murder in the London Silver Vaults (1,295)11 210
Run Rose Run/Dolly Parton and James Patterson
(Century £20) A young singer-songwriter strives to
escape her dark past and make it in Nashville (1,240)10 7FICTION PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
How to Kill Your Family
Bella Mackie
(Borough £8.99)
A woman avenges her mother’s death
by bumping off her father and his family
(14,290)222
Better Off Dead/Lee Child and Andrew Child
(Penguin £8.99) Jack Reacher comes to the aid of an
army veteran searching for her twin brother (11,210)143
The Distant Shores/Santa Montefiore
(Simon & Schuster £8.99) A biographer becomes
entangled in the disputes of her subjects (10,520)924
It Ends With Us/Colleen Hoover
(Simon & Schuster £8.99) A first love’s reappearance
threatens a woman’s present relationship (9,290)3345
The Whispers/Heidi Perks
(Penguin £7.99) A woman searches desperately for
her missing best friend (7,835)16 16
The Midnight Hour/Elly Griffiths
(Quercus £8.99) A wife tries to clear her name after
her husband is found murdered (6,785)15 17
Ugly Love/Colleen Hoover
(Simon & Schuster £8.99) The relationship between
“friends with benefits” turns complicated (6,580)6128
The Thursday Murder Club/Richard Osman
(Penguin £8.99) Four friends in a retirement village
team up to solve a murder on their doorstep (6,345)4509
Klara and the Sun/Kazuo Ishiguro
(Faber £8.99) The tale of a lifelike android bought
to be a companion to an ill teenage girl (6,110)5810
Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo/Taylor Jenkins Reid
(Simon & Schuster £8.99) An ageing Hollywood icon
reflects on her relentless rise to the top (5,745)12 18MANUALS
1
Last
week
17
Weeks
in top 10
5Burn After Writing
Sharon Jones
(Pop Press £9.99)
Encouraging the reader
to self-reflect in this
journal rather than on
social media (3,255)2
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week
1
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in top 10
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in One
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(Aster £20)
More than 100 one-dish
recipes under 600
calories (3,250)3
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week
3
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in top 10
20Pinch of Nom:
Comfort Food
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Kay Featherstone
(Bluebird £20)
Hearty, easy and
slimming recipes (2,980)4
Last
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in top 10
6Wordle Challenge
(The Ivy Press £7.99)
A collection of 500
puzzles, graded from
Easy to Expert level,
based on the popular
word game (2,255)5
Last
week
2
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in top 10
2The Meal Prep King:
Prep Yourself Slim
John Clark
(M Joseph £20)
Cook-ahead recipes,
all under 500 calories
(2,240)financial cropper after the
Wall Street Crash and spent
years in a coma. Last came
Max Hamer, charming,
cheerful and fatally
susceptible to every plausible
conman in England; hewound up in Maidstone
prison for attempted fraud.
Along the way Rhys had a
passionate affair with Ford
Madox Ford, the portly yet
sexually irresistible literary
impresario. Their tormented
entanglement with Ford’s
lover Stella Bowen was told in
Quartet (1928), Rhys’s
claustrophobic first novel. At
the time the editor of The
Transatlantic Review, Ford
helped Rhys to write the tiny,
pungent stories of down-and-
out Paris life that became her
first collection, The Left Bank
(1927). Through him she met
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude
Stein and James Joyce, but
kept what Miranda Seymour
calls “a maddening
discretion” about her amours.
With war becoming
imminent in 1939, nobody
wanted to read Rhys’s fourth
novel, the terminally
despairing Good Morning
Midnight, and she virtually
disappeared from public view.
Her fondness for whisky led to
public scenes; she would fly
into rages at any mild remark,
scream, spit and lash out.
Court appearances in Bromley
were frequent. When she
shouted “Heil Hitler!” in acountry pub, her husband
was asked to leave the RAF.
Amazingly her career was
saved in 1949 by a Dutch
actress, Selma Vaz Dias, who
put a small ad in the New
Statesman, asking if anyone
knew of Rhys’s whereabouts.
The women exchanged
letters: the actress had fallen
in love with Good Morning
Midnight and wanted to
perform it. Rhys was ecstatic
and bragged about it in her
London suburb, after which
an unimpressed neighbour
emptied a rubbish bin over
her head. After the ensuing
melee Rhys and her husband
were banned from living^
in Beckenham.
I had expected the final
100 pages to be all geriatric
decline, but they are full of
incident. Her stories wereRhys was
taunted as
a ‘white
cockroach’
She married three times.
Husband No 1, Jean Lenglet,
was a Belgian man of mystery,
a spy, embezzler, bigamist and
jailbird. No 2, Leslie Tilden-
Smith, a publisher’s reader
and freelance editor, came a
ALAMYbrought back into the light;
after the publication of
Sargasso in 1966 critics such
as Al Alvarez wrote glowing
encomia, calling her “the best
living English novelist”.
Agents fought to control her
film and TV rights. In 1978 the
Queen conferred a CBE on her
wizened frame. Rhys died a
year later, aged 88.
To the end she remained
bloody-minded. One day she
was enjoying a spliff at the
home of George and Diana
Melly; the next she was
wielding a knife and calling
Diana “the enemy”.
This is a first-class life and
a rollicking read. Seymour
skilfully interweaves the
autographical stories and
novels with the people and
fortunes in Rhys’s crazily
adventurous life. She’s
warmly sympathetic to the
young ingénue of 17, and only
slightly less so to the old bat of- She’s also the only Rhys
biographer who travelled to
Dominica to see what it was
about the island — its colours,
smells, conflicted history and
voodoo sorcery — that haunted
Rhys all her days but fired her
imagination. The result is
close to a masterpiece. c
1 May 2022 25