the times | Saturday June 11 2022 saturday review 21
bestsellers
Paperback Fiction
1 (2) The Man Who Died Twice
Richard Osman
Penguin £8.992 (4)How to Kill Your Family
Bella Mackie Borough £8.993 (1) Sorrow and Bliss
Meg Mason
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.994
(new)The Maidens
Alex Michaelides
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.995 (7) It Ends With Us
Colleen Hoover
Simon & Schuster £8.996
(new)Great Circle
Maggie Shipstead
Penguin £8.99
7
(new)The Women of Troy
Pat Barker Penguin £8.998 (—)The Seven Husbands of Evelyn
Hugo Taylor Jenkins Reid
Simon & Schuster £8.999 (8)The Island of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak Penguin £8.9910 (6)Silverview John le Carré
Penguin £8.99Hardback Non-fiction
1 (2) Hope Tom Parker
Blink £20
2 (5) Why Has Nobody Told Me This
Before? Julie Smith
Michael Joseph £16.993 (1) Good Pop, Bad Pop
Jarvis Cocker
Jonathan Cape £204 (6)House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries
Alan Bennett Profile £6.99
5 (3) Russia: Revolution and Civil
War 1917-1921 Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld & Nicolson £306 (7) The Premonitions Bureau
Sam Knight Faber £14.997 (4)Buried: An Alternative History
of the First Millennium in Britain
Alice Roberts
Simon & Schuster £208
(new)Lilibet: The Girl Who Would Be
Queen AN Wilson Manilla £9.99
9 (10)Life Time: The New Science of
the Body Clock Russell Foster
Penguin Life £16.9910
(new)The Queen: 70 Glorious Years
Royal Collection Trust £24.951 (3) Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus
Doubleday £14.992 (2) The Murders at Fleat House
Lucinda Riley
Macmillan £20
3 (4) Lion Conn Iggulden
Michael Joseph £204 (7) Book of Night
Holly Black Del Rey £16.99
5 (1) With a Mind to Kill
Anthony Horowitz
Jonathan Cape £206 (8)Elektra Jennifer Saint
Wildfire £14.997 (9) Young Mungo
Douglas Stuart
Picador £16.998 (10)One of the Girls
Lucy Clarke
HarperCollins £14.99
9 (6)Bad Actors Mick Herron
Baskerville £18.9910 (—)People Person
Candice Carty-Williams
Trapeze £12.99Hardback Fiction
1 (1) Storyland: A New Mythology
of Britain Amy Jeffs
riverrun £12.992
(new)Free: Coming of Age at the End
of History Lea Ypi
Penguin £9.99
3 (2) And Away... Bob Mortimer
Simon & Schuster £8.994
(new)The Anglo-Saxons: A History
of the Beginnings of England
Marc Morris Penguin £10.995 (3) The Wim Hof Method
Wim Hof Rider £8.996 (10)Diddly Squat Jeremy Clarkson
Penguin £8.997
(new)Noise Daniel Kahneman,
Olivier Sibony, Cass Sunstein
William Collins £10.998
(new)Black Gold: The History of How
Coal Made Britain
Jeremy Paxman
William Collins £10.999 (9)Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman Vintage £9.9910 (7)Putin’s People Catherine Belton
William Collins £9.99Paperback Non-fiction
THE NUMBER IN PARENTHESES REPRESENTS CHART POSITIONS LAST WEEK. DATA SUPPLIED BY WATERSTONES FOR THE WEEK ENDING JUNE 4audiobook
of the
week
Lessons in Chemistry
by Bonnie Garmus,
read by Miranda Raison,
Penguin 11hr 56min
Laugh-aloud funny, witty
and provocative, Lessons
in Chemistry recreates
the rampant sexism of
America just before Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique (1963) and the
bonfire of the bras.
Elizabeth Zott is a
brilliant chemist whose
horny boss pinches her
research as well as her
bottom, but she finds a
twin soul in Nobel prize
nominee Calvin Evans.
After his death in a traffic
accident, she’s left as an
unmarried mother and
given the sack. To make
money, she becomes a
television cook in the
notoriously difficult
“afternoon depression
zone”, but rejects slinky
frocks and fake smiles in
favour of lab overalls and
a scientific approach.
“Cooking is chemistry,
and chemistry is life,” she
says, calling salt sodium
potassium as she provides
daily menus for Supper
at Six. Flattered by being
talked to seriously,
millions of women are
soon taking notes and
enjoying her incendiary
asides. Add a precocious
daughter, brilliant
backchat and the perfect
deadpan narrator in
Miranda Raison, and
relish this to its final,
still wise diktat: “Children,
set the table. Your
mother needs a
moment to herself.”
Christina Hardyment
Ghosted (13+)
by Emily Barr
Penguin, 400pp; £7.99
The new young adult
novel from Emily Barr
(The One Memory of
Flora Banks), has a
tagline to rival that of
Jaws: “She was the loveof his life... and his afterlife.”
Unfortunately, it is such a goodie that
it’s repeated endlessly towards the end
of this ambitious novel. Set in Devon
in 2019, the story sometimes raises
more questions than it answers,
bringing to mind Groundhog
Day and Memento.
In the latter Christopher
Nolan movie, Guy Pearce’s
character, suffering from
amnesia, sets out to find
out who attacked him and
killed his wife. In Ghosted —
a pun on the social media crime
of ignoring a message and a nod to
this being, well, a ghost story — Joe,
a teenage boy who disappeared
in 1999, haunts Ariel, 16, in 2019. Ariel
doesn’t just see Joe, she can see allsorts of ghosts, on the train and in the
corridors at school.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Ariel’s mum
has died of cancer and her dad, a doctor
with anger issues, has walked out on
her and her pregnant sister.
Joe’s plight becomes Ariel’s
new reason to live. They
meet up almost every day
in the room where he died.
For Joe, it’s always the day
of his death and he can’t
seem to change his fate
however hard he tries each
day. Yet time moves on as usual
for Ariel. They figure out between
them — with the help of a ghost called
Lara — that all the spirits Ariel can see
have had deaths shrouded in mystery or
uncertainty. With this knowledge, shesets out to find out what really
happened to the popular, good-looking
boy with no obvious enemies.
While sleuthing, Ariel meets Joe’s
brother, Gus, now middle-aged with a
wife and kids, and his old school friends,
Troy and Lucas, all partly paralysed by
Joe’s childhood vanishing act.
The twist is set up rather too
decisively: I had it from the get-go. A
couple of further niggles: the original
police search, in 1999, seems comically
poor. And would the girls’ father really
have run off in a fury, but continued to
give them a stipend?
That aside, it’s thoroughly enjoyable.
Ariel and Joe are believable characters,
and Barr, left, makes good points about
grief, friendship and the pain of
revisiting our teenage selves.children’s book
of the week
Alex O’Connell is
pulled into this
spirited love story