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
(7,065)1202
Life Time/Russell Foster
(Penguin Life £16.99) The new science of our body
clock and its effect on sleep and health (3,995)—13
House Arrest/Alan Bennett
(Profile £6.99) Reflections on Covid-19 and
confinement from the English playwright (3,080)534
The Palace Papers/Tina Brown
(Century £20) Biography of the House of Windsor
in the decades since Diana’s death (2,230)245
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse/
Charlie Mackesy (Ebury £16.99) An illustrated
fable containing gentle life philosophy (2,185)61376
The War on the West/Douglas Murray
(HarperCollins £20) Political writer’s polemic in
defence of western civilisation and culture (1,745)347
Nothing But the Truth/The Secret Barrister
(Picador £20) Stories from life as a practising
barrister working in criminal law (1,315)728
Manifest/Roxie Nafousi
(M Joseph £16.99) An introduction to the personal
development practice of manifestation (1,310)14 179
Life Is Sad and Beautiful/Hussain Manawer
(Yellow Kite £14.99) The debut poetry collection
from the poet and mental health campaigner (1,250)4210
Chums/Simon Kuper
(Profile £16.99) How a narrow talent pool of Oxford
Tories came to dominate British politics (1,205)21 2GENERAL PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
The Wim Hof Method
Wim Hof
(Rider £8.99)
Dutch extreme athlete’s life story
and mind-over-matter philosophy
(5,430)162
Brothers in Arms/James Holland
(Penguin £9.99) The Sherwood Rangers tank
regiment’s war from D-Day to VE Day (3,990)323
Storyland/Amy Jeffs
(riverrun £12.99) Art historian and printmaker’s
illustrated mythology of the British Isles (3,135)234
The Seven Ages of Death/Richard Shepherd
(Penguin £9.99) The forensic pathologist shares more
insights on life, death and the human body (2,785)425
A Life on Our Planet/David Attenborough
(Ebury £9.99) On his broadcasting career, the planet’s
biodiversity loss and hopes for the future (2,700)10 26
Atomic Habits/James Clear
(Random House £16.99) The minuscule changes
that can grow into life-altering outcomes (2,300)5407
Operation Pedestal/Max Hastings
(Wm Collins £9.99) The story of the Royal Navy
fleet that battled to Malta in August 1942 (2,145)20 18
Good Vibes, Good Life/Vex King
(Hay House £10.99) How positive thinking, self-love
and overcoming fear lead to lasting happiness (2,085)6 1179
The Power of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) A study of ten regions
that could define global politics in the future (2,065)73410
Four Thousand Weeks/Oliver Burkeman
(Vintage £9.99) Realigning our relationship with
time to live a more meaningful life (1,825)11 4BOOKS
From Roger Federer to Bob Dylan — a quirky look at bowing out with grace (or not)
problems with neck strain
and backache.
However, the single early
mention asks a good question.
When Andy Murray
(prematurely) announced his
retirement from tennis in
January 2019, how did that
make Federer (six years older)
feel about his future, and the
days to come — and how, by
extension, do we contemplate
our time that’s left?
Gradually his project
comes into focus. Dyer wantsdefying master of
procrastination, digression
and magpie-minded
subject-switching.
His books take imaginative
leaps around his passions —
art, literature, travel, drugs,
sport and happiness — and
fling tangential thoughts,
allusions, quotations and
random connections into
the air. He is also recklessly
frank about his body and its
physical shortcomings, and
often savagely funny.
Tennis enthusiasts alarmed
by the title of his new book,
The Last Days of Roger
Federer, may wonder why
their hero gets only a single
mention in the first 50 pages,
while we’re given far more
information about Bob
Dylan’s lyrics, Jim Morrison
of the Doors, Jack Kerouac,
the Robert Redford film
All Is Lost, DH Lawrence’s
conviction that his illness
wasn’t TB but a rage inspired
by Europe, and Dyer’s ownESSAYS
John Walsh
The Last Days of Roger
Federer And Other Endings
by Geoff Dyer
Canongate £20 pp287
Fans of Geoff Dyer have learnt
to manage their expectations
of what they’ll find in his
books. Readers who opened
Out of Sheer Rage: In the
Shadow of DH Lawrence,
expecting a learned study
of the Lady Chatterley author,
read instead about Dyer’s
complete failure to write
the book — and about how
much he hates academic
criticism. His Yoga for People
Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It
offered reflections on the
concept of travel, of simply
being elsewhere, rather than
on the lotus position or the
downward dog. But that’s
Dyer for you. He’s a genre-
How do we
contemplate
our time
that’s left?
MONTAGE BY JEFF POTTER. ORIGINALS: GETTY IMAGESto explore “last” things in
art, music, literature, sport
and public careers, the final
attempts at creativity, the
urge to achieve, like
Tennyson’s Ulysses, “some
work of noble note... not
unbecoming men who strove
with gods”. But he’s also keen
to investigate the life-defining
moments that make the
remainder of some lives sadly
anticlimactic: such as Jack
Kerouac, whose second novel,
On the Road, was judged “an
authentic work of art” by The
New York Times in 1957, after
which he declined into an
alcoholic blob. Or Boris
Becker, three times
Wimbledon champion by 22;
or the Second World War
fighter pilot Geoffrey
Wellums, told he was “over
the hill” in 1941, whose 2002
memoir First Light recalls
the oddness of being
“merely a survivor... a
worn-out bloody fighter pilot
at 20 years of age”.Dyer writes well about art
and the struggle to represent
sensations of seeing and
feeling on canvas. He
describes how a Great
Western train passenger
watched a man impetuously
leap up from his seat and
crane out of the window tol Sleep sells — we all do it,
and most of us wish we could
do it more. So it makes sense
that Russell Foster’s Life Time,
on the science behind our
body clock, has entered the
lists at No 2 in its first week.
l Lessons in Chemistry by
Bonnie Garmus is in the top
spot in its seventh week in
the fiction charts. It looks set
to be the book of the summer
— only to be challenged,
perhaps, by Joanna Quinn’s
The Whalebone Theatre,
which India Knight adores
and reviews on p35.
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 21/05/22.
Figures shown are sales for
the seven-day period.
Endings Geoff Dyer, centre,
and two of his subjects,
Roger Federer and Bob DylanHow to end your career
32 29 May 2022