FICTION HARDBACKS
Last
weekWeeks in
top 101
Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus
(Doubleday £14.99)
In 1960s America a chemist becomes
the star of a popular TV cooking show
(2,405)572
Thrown/Sara Cox
(Coronet £14.99) Four women bond at a new pottery
class held in a local community centre (2,175)223
Bad Actors/Mick Herron
(Baskerville £18.99) A key member of a government
think tank disappears without a trace (2,155)124
Wrong Place Wrong Time/Gillian McAllister
(M Joseph £14.99) A mother travels backwards through
time to stop a murder committed by her son (1,950)425
Young Mungo/Douglas Stuart
(Picador £16.99) The relationship between two teenage
boys is threatened by the sectarian divide (1,865)866
The Saturday Night Sauvignon Sisterhood/Gill Sims
(HarperCollins £12.99) A set of friends are brought
together by a shared love of liquid therapy (1,655)627
22 Seconds/James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
(Century £20) Sergeant Lindsay Boxer puts her life
on the line to stop guns hitting the streets (1,530)748
People Person/Candice Carty-Williams
(Trapeze £12.99) An aspiring social media star is
reunited with her siblings after a family crisis (1,430)16 39
Storm Tide/Wilbur Smith and Tom Harper
(Zaffre £20) Three generations of the Courtney family
fight on opposing sides of a brutal war (1,315)14 510
No Less the Devil/Stuart MacBride
(Bantam Press £20) While chasing a serial killer, a
detective sergeant is distracted by an ex-con (1,225)12 3FICTION PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
The Man Who Died Twice
Richard Osman
(Penguin £8.99)
Stolen diamonds worth £20 million cause
chaos for the Thursday Murder Club
(41,580)122
The Dark Hours/Michael Connelly
(Orion £8.99) Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch
investigate a murder at a street party (13,080)523
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 (11,695)264
It Ends With Us/Colleen Hoover
(Simon & Schuster £8.99) A first love’s reappearance
threatens a woman’s present relationship (10,225)7385
Sorrow and Bliss/Meg Mason
(Weidenfeld £8.99) A troubled woman struggles with
the feeling that her life is too broken to fix (9,160)346
The Thursday Murder Club/Richard Osman
(Penguin £8.99) Four friends in a retirement village
team up to solve a murder on their doorstep (8,440)10 537
Silverview/John le Carré
(Penguin £8.99) A bookshop owner in a seaside town
receives a proposal from an enigmatic visitor (8,210)448
The Silver Serpent/Scott Mariani
(HarperNorth £8.99) Ben Hope answers the call when
a man vanishes in the Australian wilderness (7,510)11 19
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 (7,195)9810
Not a Happy Family/Shari Lapena
(Penguin £8.99) A rich couple are murdered after
a tense dinner with their three children (7,165)84MANUALS
1
Last
week
1
Weeks
in top 10
2The Hairy Dieters’
Simple Healthy Food
Si King and Dave Myers
(Seven Dials £16.99)
Low-calorie recipes that
contain easy-to-find
ingredients (4,960)2
Last
week
2
Weeks
in top 10
24Pinch of Nom:
Comfort Food
Kate Allinson and
Kay Featherstone
(Bluebird £20)
Hearty easy and slimming
recipes (2,210)3
Last
week
5
Weeks
in top 10
10Wordle Challenge
(The Ivy Press £7.99)
A collection of 500
puzzles, graded from
easy to expert level,
based on the popular
word game (1,720)4
Last
week
4
Weeks
in top 10
4BBC Proms 2022:
Festival Guide
(BBC Proms £8.99)
A guide to the world’s
biggest and longest-
running classical music
festival (1,640)5
Last
week
15
Weeks
in top 10
2The Great British
Sewing Bee: The
Modern Wardrobe
Juliet Uzor
(Quadrille £27)
Projects and alteration
techniques (1,530)along. From there it’s a skip
and a jump to the 1945 film
Brief Encounter and the guilty
lovers’ constant dashing to
catch the steaming last train
home to bourgeois sanity.
I enjoyed Dyer’s seemingly
random flitting from subject
to image to artist to critic toancient to modern, but the
book’s structure is frankly
bizarre: 180 nuggets (some
100 words long, some four
pages) divided into three
sections without explanation
or internal coherence.
Some entries, about jazz
performances or psychedelic
high jinks at the Burning
Man festival in Nevada,
left me cold. But there are
always delights and bons
mots around the corner.
Such as Dyer’s hilarious
takedowns of famous books
he hates: especially Anthony
Powell’s 12-volume sequence
A Dance to the Music of Time,
Conrad’s Nostromo, Henry
James’s The Ambassadors
and most of William Faulkner
(“The Sound and the Fury
was an absolute doddle:
three pages were enough
to persuade me I’d never
make it”).
Although he is a
connoisseur of classical
music, he’s annoyed by
people who can tell you the
opus number of every sonata:
“The needle of that unfailing
and enduring feat of chippy
English engineering, the
trusty old ponce-o-meter,
dives into the red.”Near the end he addresses
the subject of literary endings,
and points out that “the
unfinished and the
unfinishable” are central to
Romanticism: Coleridge’s
fragment Kubla Khan,
Wordsworth’s inspirational
wrecks the Ruined Cottage
and Tintern Abbey, Shelley’s
crumbled stone tyrant
Ozymandias, Jean Rhys’s
autobiography Smile Please.
And one wonders: how will
this awesomely sophisticated
inspector of endings — this
sublime end-oscopist, if I may
call him that — finish his book?
The answer is: by making
it personal. He says he will
embrace the end while taking
a certain hallucinogenic
drug, listening to an album
called Lamentations (“music
so devoid of time, it’s almost
not even music. It’s the sound
of your brain as it leaves
the body”) and noting that
his fascination for Emma
Raducanu has made him
start to forget about the man
he has always called “Roger”.
It’s a sweetly transcendental
conclusion to a book that,
despite its gloomy subject,
bulges with energy and sings
with joy. cfeel the rushing air on his
face: it was JMW Turner,
whose Rain, Steam and Speed
(1844), in its foggy tumult
of colour, anticipated
impressionism and contrasted
with works by Monet and
Pissarro, which showed
trains sedately chuffing
PAPERBACK
OF THE WEEK
Free by Lea Ypi
Penguin £9.99A deeply
resonant
memoir about
growing up
in Albania, in
the final days
of the last
Stalinist
outpost of the 20th century.
What makes this Baillie
Gifford-shortlisted book
unforgettable is that we see
this world, one about which
we know so little, through
the eyes of a child, as
11-year-old Lea tries to
interpret the events
unfolding around her.
Laura HackettST DIGITAL
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29 May 2022 33