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
(7,260)1152
Freezing Order/Bill Browder
(Simon & Schuster £20) Uncovering Kremlin
criminality and life on the run from Putin (3,660)—13
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
Charlie Mackesy (Ebury £16.99) An illustrated
fable containing gentle life philosophy (2,245)2 1324
Manifest/Roxie Nafousi
(M Joseph £14.99) An introduction to the personal
development practice of manifestation (1,745)4155
Big Panda and Tiny Dragon/James Norbury
(M Joseph £14.99) Illustrated mindful tale of
friendship, inspired by Buddhist philosophy (1,740)5236
Taste/Stanley Tucci
(Fig Tree £20) A gastronomic journey through the
actor’s life in and out of the kitchen (1,340)387
Brazen/Julia Haart
(Endeavour £18.99) Memoir by the fashion designer
and star of Netflix’s My Unorthodox Life (1,130)—18
Queen of Our Times/Robert Hardman
(Macmillan £20) The life of Queen Elizabeth II from
her birth in 1926 to the present day (1,090)11 49
Super-Infinite/Katherine Rundell
(Faber £16.99) The extraordinary life of the English
poet, law scholar and cleric John Donne (1,070)—110
Behind the Seams/Esme Young
(Blink £18.99) The fashion designer and Great British
Sewing Bee judge on her life in fashion (1,005)—1GENERAL PAPERBACKS
Last
weekWeeks
in top 101
Happy Mind, Happy Life
Rangan Chatterjee
(Penguin Life £16.99)
The GP shares insights
into the science of happiness
(5,690)132
Good Vibes, Good Life/Vex King
(Hay House £10.99) How positive thinking, self-love
and overcoming fear lead to lasting happiness (3,015)9 1123
The Wim Hof Method/Wim Hof
(Rider & Co £8.99) The Dutch extreme athlete’s life
story and mind-over-matter philosophy (3,000)—14
Lily’s Promise/Lily Ebert and Dov Forman
(Pan £8.99) A Holocaust survivor’s story of her life
in Hungary and her time in Auschwitz (2,995)—15
The Power of Geography/Tim Marshall
(Elliott & Thompson £9.99) A study of ten regions
that could define global politics in the future (2,990)7296
This Is Going to Hurt/Adam Kay
(Picador £8.99) A doctor turned comedian’s account
of what life was like on the NHS front line (2,965)5 1387
Putin’s People/Catherine Belton
(Wm Collins £9.99) How Putin and his KGB entourage
seized power in Russia and turned on the West (2,935)3118
Atomic Habits/James Clear
(Random House £16.99) The minuscule changes
that can grow into life-altering outcomes (2,835)8359
Four Thousand Weeks/Oliver Burkeman
(Vintage £9.99) Realigning our relationship with
time to live a more meaningful life (2,555)4210
The Comfort Book/Matt Haig
(Canongate £9.99) Aphorisms, stories and
meditations that offer comfort in hard times (2,550)65BOOKS
A beautiful memoir about losing a father — and gaining a lover
both villain and victim”. The
loss of the bill you were about
to post, the jumper you were
just wearing, the credit card
whipped out to pay for a
meal, can spark irritation,
shock and disbelief. Most
losses, she says, “diminish our
lives”, but she can’t support
the suggestion in Bishop’s
poem that minor losses like
keys and watches can help to
prepare us for more serious
ones. When her father dies,
“peacefully, at 74, tended
throughout his final weeks by
those he loved most”, she
knows this is “not a tragedy”,
but becomes consumed not
just by grief but by the
ubiquity of loss.
Her father, Isaac Schulz,
lost most of his family in
the Holocaust, but found
— after a spell in Israel and,
surprisingly, in postwar
Germany — a new life as a
lawyer in Ohio, a love of
literature, learning,
philosophy and laughter, sixextraordinary book, is how
we cope when those losses
change our world.
A staff writer at The New
Yorker, Schulz might seem to
know more about winning
than losing. She won a
Pulitzer prize for her article
The Really Big One, about
seismic risk in the Pacific
northwest, and great acclaim
for her book Being Wrong,
about — well, being wrong.
Her TED talk Don’t Regret
Regret has had nearly
2.5 million views and another
one, On Being Wrong, more
than five million views. Her
new book, Lost & Found, grew
out of an article, When Things
Go Missing, that has been
anthologised in The Best
American Essays. All that
being wrong and losing seems
to be working out quite well.
Losing things, Schulz says,
“routinely makes us feel lousy
about ourselves”, not least
since in “the microdrama of
loss, we are nearly alwaysAUTOBIOGRAPHY
Christina Patterson
Lost & Found
A Memoir
by Kathryn Schulz
Picador £14.99 pp256
By the time we turn 60,
according to Kathryn Schulz,
we will have lost nearly
200,000 things. Her sister, for
example, loses “cellphone,
annually; wallet, quarterly;
keys, monthly” and almost
shut down Oakland airport
when she left behind her
partner’s laptop after first
losing her own. Her father
regularly lost his wallet, his
coat, his baseball tickets, his
direction and any memory of
where he had parked the car.
The “art of losing”, as
Elizabeth Bishop says in her
poem One Art, “isn’t hard to
master”. The challenge, and
the one Schulz tackles in this
fluent languages and a wife
and two daughters he adored.
“My father had something
urgent to say about almost
everything,” Schulz says, “the
novels of Edith Wharton, thenature of cosmic background
radiation, the infield fly rule
in baseball.” His daughter has
clearly inherited his insatiable
curiosity and intellectual
range. Her quest to examine
the nature of loss ranges from
Freud and Mary Poppins to
Ariosto, Dante and the loss ofl Douglas Stuart was one of
the most popular Booker
winners when Shuggie Bain
carried off the award in 2020.
His appeal shows no sign of
waning, with his second
novel, Young Mungo, jumping
straight into the fiction
bestsellers on publication.
l The continued power of
book review pages can be
seen in one of this year’s
more unlikely bestsellers,
Katherine Rundell’s life of
the poet John Donne,
which makes the hardback
non-fiction list after
universally rave reviews.
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 16/04/22.
Figures shown are sales for
the seven-day period.
Family bonds Kathryn
Schulz, right, with her motherThe truth about loss
32 24 April 2022