the times | Saturday May 28 2022 saturday review 21
bestsellers
Paperback Fiction
1 (1) Sorrow and Bliss Meg Mason
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.99
2 (2) The Man Who Died Twice
Richard Osman Penguin £8.993 (4) How to Kill Your Family
Bella Mackie Borough £8.99
4 (5)The Khan Saima Mir
Oneworld £8.99
5 (6) Silverview
John le Carré
Penguin £8.99
6 (8)It Ends With Us
Colleen Hoover
Simon & Schuster £8.997 (3) Book Lovers
Emily Henry
Penguin £8.99
8 (7)The Island of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak
Penguin £8.99
9 (9)Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber £8.99
10 (—)The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman
Penguin £8.99Hardback Non-fiction
1 (1) Why Has Nobody Told Me This
Before Julie Smith
Michael Joseph £16.99
2 (3) House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries
Alan Bennett Profile £6.99
3
(new)Life Time: The New Science of
the Body Clock Russell Foster
Penguin £16.99
4 (4)The Premonitions Bureau
Sam Knight Faber £14.99
5 (2) Nothing But the Truth
The Secret Barrister
Picador £20
6 (5)The War on the West
Douglas Murray
HarperCollins £20
7
(new)A Village in the Third Reich
Julia Boyd, Angelika Patel
Elliott & Thompson £25
8 (7)Freezing Order Bill Browder
Simon & Schuster £20
9 (10)Chums Simon Kuper
Profile £16.99
10 (8)Life Is Sad and Beautiful
Hussain Manawer
Yellow Kite £14.991 (1) Bad Actors Mick Herron
Baskerville £18.99
2
(new)The Stardust Thief
Chelsea Abdullah
Orbit £14.99
3 (6)Young Mungo Douglas Stuart
Picador £16.99
4 (9)Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus
Doubleday £14.99
5 (8)Elektra Jennifer Saint
Wildfire £14.99
6 (7)Book of Night Holly Black
Del Rey £16.997
(new)Elizabeth of York
Alison Weir
Headline £20
8 (2)The House with the Golden Door
Elodie Harper
Apollo £16.99
9 (3)The Dance Tree
Kiran Millwood Hargrave
Picador £14.99
10 (10)People Person
Candice Carty-Williams
Trapeze £12.99Hardback Fiction
1 (1) Storyland: A New Mythology of
Britain Amy Jeffs riverrun £12.99
2 (2) The Hairy Dieters’ Simple Healthy
Food Si King & Dave Myers
Seven Dials £16.99
3 (4) The Wim Hof Method
Wim Hof Rider & Co £8.99
4 (3)BBC Proms 2022: Festival Guide
BBC Proms Guides £8.995 (6) Aftermath: Life in the Fallout
of the Third Reich
Harald Jähner WH Allen £9.99
6 (5)Putin’s People
Catherine Belton
William Collins £9.99
7 (7) Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman Vintage £9.99
8 (8)Happy Mind, Happy Life
Dr Rangan Chatterjee
Penguin £16.99
9 (—)The Power of Geography
Tim Marshall
Elliott & Thompson £9.99
10 (—)Empire of Pain
Patrick Radden Keefe
Picador £9.99Paperback Non-fiction
THE NUMBER IN PARENTHESES REPRESENTS CHART POSITIONS LAST WEEK. DATA SUPPLIED BY WATERSTONES FOR THE WEEK ENDING MAY 21audiobook
of the
we ek
Super-Infinite: The
Transformations of
John Donne by
Katherine Rundell,
read by Jamie Parker,
Faber, 8hr 41min
Katherine Rundell is best
known for her ebullient
children’s books, but
she has now channelled
her imagination and
enthusiasm into a
fast-moving biography
of the 17th-century poet
and preacher John
Donne. The fruit of ten
years’ study, its short
chapters bulletpoint a
life that was ramshackle
until James I bestowed
on the penurious poet
the lucrative post of
dean of St Paul’s, and
thousands massed to
hear him preach.
Rundell knits the life
to the work, bringing out
the early hardships that
made Donne “a fount of
satirical, mean snide”,
and highlighting his
deep-seated belief that
body and mind should be
intermeshed, with mind
given primacy: lovers
“inter-assured of the
mind, care less eyes, lips,
hands to miss”. Jamie
Parker’s voice can be
engagingly intimate
and deeply serious, and
projects Donne’s words
so that they live on in the
listener’s mind.
For an audiobook of
Donne’s work, try Richard
Burton purring such
famous poems as The
Good-Morrow, The Triple
Fool and The Sun Rising
(Saland, 34min).
Christina Hardyment
Friends Like These
(12+) by Meg Rosoff,
Bloomsbury, 320pp;
£12.99
Meg Rosoff is still
marketed as a young
adult author, but really
this book is for anyone
interested in femaledynamics and that strange period
in life between being a student and
your first proper job. This
is the second in what
Rosoff, right, told me in an
interview last year was to
be a trilogy set over three
summers. Friends Like
These follows The Great
Godden, a beach noir
about narcissism and a
teenage crush that goes
horribly wrong.
In this new novel she
has flown from that
breezy Suffolk shoreline
to sweltering New York
City, centring on a
friendship between two interns on a
newspaper in the summer of 1983. Bethis a careful, thoughtful small-town girl
away from home for the first time
thanks to a brilliant local
paper scoop with her
byline on it; Edie is
a knowing, garrulous
New Yorker from the
Upper East Side who
talks before she thinks,
usually to her shrink
about her intense
media-savvy parents.
At first their friendship
seems the perfect fit —
opposites attract and all
that — as they share
projects, navigate their
new workplace and
seemingly ignore the boy
interns whom Edie declares gay orghastly. The girls drink icy cocktails
after work and chew the office cud. I
loved her evocation of what it’s like to
be young and working on newspapers
in a pre-digital era (it was fun, kids).
When Edie invites Beth to move into
her parents’ chic place, an escape from
the sweltering, cockroach-infested flat
she shares with stoner Tom and his
girlfriend, she leaps at the chance.
At first it’s heaven in grown-up
Manhattan. Then Beth begins to
appreciate that the family’s generosity
comes at a heavy price. Rosoff conjures
up dazzlingly that stage of life when the
possibilities can be endless, but the
probability is that you’ll just annoy your
boss, snog someone inappropriate and
lose a friend after a bad call. This
summer’s must-read.children’s book
of the week
p b a N U t u a m s o t p n sAlex O’Connell on
a must-read tale of
entering the world