This month’s best paperbacks
March
Not sure what to read this month? Here are some outstanding new paperbacks, including a Beatles biography, and one of Inspector Montalbano’s last cases
Memoir
A heartfelt story of birds and fathers
Featherhood
Charlie Gilmour
Featherhood Charlie Gilmour
A heartfelt story of birds and fathers
Featherhood deals with themes of parental failure. Gilmour finds comfort in the company of an abandoned baby magpie while recalling how his father, the poet Heathcote Williams, left him and his mother when he was an infant, and subsequently rebuffed his son’s attempts to get to know him. Gilmour, who was raised by his mother, author Polly Samson, and stepfather, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, made headlines in 2010 when he was photographed swinging from the Cenotaph during a student protest. “It wasn’t the glorious dead I wanted to attack that day,” he writes, “but the glorious dad.”
Fiona Sturges
£8.36 (£8.99 RRP) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshopRead more
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Crime
Inspector Montalbano's penultimate case
The Sicilian Method
Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli
The Sicilian Method Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli
Inspector Montalbano's penultimate case
Italy's beloved Camilleri, who died at the age of 93 in 2019, kept this 26th installment in the Inspector Montalbano mystery series with his publisher for years, asking for it to be published only after his death. And many fans felt it was worth the wait, with the bullish, food-loving Montalbano tasked with finding a killer in a theatrical play. Riccardino, the final Montalbano book, has yet to be published in English.
Sian Cain
£8.36 (£8.99 RRP) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshopRead more
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Science
Prize-winning study of neurodivergence
Explaining Humans
Camilla Pang
Explaining Humans Camilla Pang
Prize-winning study of neurodivergence
At 28, Pang became the youngest writer ever to win the prestigious Royal Society science book prize for this debut, using science to explore the complexities of human behaviour through the prism of her autism spectrum disorder. Both intelligent and humorous, Explaining Humans challenges myths about neurodivergence as well as pulling apart social norms.
Sian Cain
£8.49 (£9.99 RRP) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshopRead more
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Fiction
Adventures in love and language
The Liar’s Dictionary
Eley Williams
The Liar’s Dictionary Eley Williams
Adventures in love and language
Peter Winceworth is working on the “S” section of Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary in 1899. Ignored, taken for granted, suddenly but unrequitedly in love, he is a consciously unheroic figure quietly resigned to his lot – except for a small kindling of rebellion that emboldens him to insert new words of his own devising. Mallory is an intern at Swansby’s a century later, tasked with rooting out aberrant entries that seem to have crept in. She imagines the person who might have made up these words; he imagines the reader who will one day find them. Williams won prizes and delighted readers with Attrib. and Other Stories (2017), a collection in which dazzled celebrations of love were inseparable from a head-over-heels courtship of language. Her first novel takes us deep into the world of lexicography and asks: can a dictionary lie? Would the addition of a little fiction to an authoritative work of reference be a desecration or the making of it? A warm, intricate novel shaped by a powerfully humane and uncoercive intelligence
Alexandra Harris
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Music
A portrait of the Beatles
One Two Three Four
Craig Brown
One Two Three Four Craig Brown
A portrait of the Beatles
The latest to enter the crowded library of Beatles books, One Two Three Four is not a biography so much as a group portrait in vignettes, a rearrangement of stories and legends whose trick is to make them gleam anew. This is a social history as well as a musical one. Success came slowly at first, and then quickly, “as a landslide, flattening those ahead”. Brown is an able memoirist, with an instinct for selection that quite eludes the Beatles’ most exhaustive chronicler, Mark Lewisohn, whose basic principle is to include everything he knows. One Two Three Four hasn’t the authority or the insight of Ian MacDonald’s sacred Revolution in the Head, and lacking an index it isn’t as useful as Philip Norman’s 1981 biography Shout! But it does offer an intriguing sideline in characters who were tangential to the Beatles’ story, including the drummer Jimmie Nicol, a Beatle-surrogate for 10 days when Ringo had tonsilitis and whose life thereafter fell through the cracks.
Anthony Quinn
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Crime
High-octane heist novel
Blacktop Wasteland
SA Cosby
Blacktop Wasteland SA Cosby
High-octane heist novel
A superb character study wrapped up in a high-octane heist novel, Blacktop Wasteland is the story of Beauregard “Bug” Montage, a black Virginian with a criminal past as a getaway driver. Now he’s trying to stay on the right side of the law for the sake of his family, despite a failing business and ever-increasing debts. Bug is reluctant to sell the car left to him by father Anthony, another wheelman, who disappeared leaving his son to do time for a crime committed on his behalf. Instead, he consents to help a former associate rob a jeweller’s shop, even though the plan is dodgy in every sense. Things go predictably wrong, Bug’s family end up in danger, and it looks as if history will repeat itself … A complex and moving take on racial tension and self-destructive masculinity, with blistering action sequences and car chases that fairly roar off the page.
Laura Wilson
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Fiction
Reissue of Booker-nominated author's debut
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Nervous Conditions Tsitsi Dangarembga
Reissue of Booker-nominated author's debut
It is the late 1960s and Tambu is a 13-year-old in rural Zimbabwe. "Although our squalor was brutal," she says, "it was uncompromisingly ours." Her brother Nhamo has been sent to the mission school in town, his education paid for by her uncle, the family elder. Tambu is thirsty for knowledge, and feels the injustice of being kept on the family homestead, but Nhamo tells her she'd be "better off with less thinking and more respect". Dangarembga's semi-autobiographical debut was first published in 1988, and is now reissued after her Booker nomination. A coming-of-age story, it ticks all the right boxes for student essayists - colonialism, gender, race - and provides a mine of information about Shona customs. Its appeal to lay readers lies with the guileless Tambu, who starts off as a rather prim little girl but turns into a perceptive and independent young woman.
Elena Seymenliyska
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Memoir
A captivating family memoir
House of Glass
Hadley Freeman
House of Glass Hadley Freeman
A captivating family memoir
This captivating family memoir, by the Guardian journalist, inscribes itself in the pantheon of family stories that connect the grandchild to the generation of the grandparents. Freeman’s focus was originally on her father’s mother, born as Sala Glahs in 1910 in Chrzanow, a small town of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She was one of four siblings, and the intertwining of the life of Sala – who later became Sara – with that of her three older brothers encouraged Freeman to broaden her attention. She traces the lives of the four siblings with elegance and humanity, and confronts the mysteries of life that cause four individuals with a similar beginning to reach very different endpoints. Is it will, or fate, or chance, or something else? Such questions flow below the surface of the narrative. Occasionally they reach out with brutal force: could it be that death in an extermination camp is the price you pay for being decent and playing by the rules?
Philippe Sands
£8.49 (£9.99 RRP) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshopRead more
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Essays
A remarkable final book from the celebrated historian
Thinking Again
Jan Morris
Thinking Again Jan Morris
A remarkable final book from the celebrated historian
Before she died last year, at the age of 94, Morris was realistic that this would be her last book. For 70 years she roamed far and wide: as a journalist she was at the triumphant ascent of Everest in 1953 and was there too for the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Most famously in the early 1970s she described what it was like to be in the advance guard of gender reassignment when she transitioned via surgery in Casablanca. Her historical writing has tended to the epic: her trilogy on the rise and fall of the British empire, Pax Britannica, is a monumental work that feels as if it had access to every heartbeat under the searing sun. In her later years, Morris started to keep a diary, and it is the second instalment, covering 130 days from the beginning of spring 2018, that makes up Thinking Again. Don’t imagine, though, that there is anything reduced about this new world. Sticking within a small radius of the converted north Wales barn where she lived allows her to roam far and wide in her imagination, unfettered by time or space. The result is a beguilingly supple narrative, able to absorb all the contradictions and revisions that mark a long, well-remembered life.
Kathryn Hughes
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Fiction
A witty, deadpan debut
Exciting Times
Naoise Dolan
Exciting Times Naoise Dolan
A witty, deadpan debut
Ava, a 22-year-old Dubliner living in Hong Kong, describes herself as “good at men”. It’s a brilliantly concise summation of her take on relationships, which she sees as a power game, an “ultimately shallow emotional transaction” in which the greatest potential benefit might be that you get to move into an apartment better than anything you can afford on your own. Julian, her posh banker boyfriend, has such an apartment – which is just as well, since he also has an arrogance to match his salary. “Why do you like me?” Ava asks him. “Who said I liked you?” he counters. An entire novel in this vein might become wearing, but Dolan takes her narrative to a new level when she brings in a character Ava actually likes: Edith, a local who went to boarding school in England. With Julian away, the women bond and Ava must interrogate herself over a whole new range of feelings.Though this model of relationship-as-power-struggle is hardly new, Dolan brings a fresh 21st-century sensibility to it.
Carrie O'Grady
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Memoir
Race, marriage and the ugly side of politics
Becoming
Michelle Obama
Becoming Michelle Obama
Race, marriage and the ugly side of politics
Becoming is a 400-page expansion of the former first lady's essential doctrine – “When they go low, we go high" – without compromising a refreshing level of honestly about what politics really did to her. This is like inserting a missing piece of reality into the narrative of Barack Obama’s dizzying journey. There are brilliant details from their love story, like the time she tried to set him up with other single women, only to discover he was just “too cerebral” for Happy Hour nights where single people would mingle. Her book confirms what was observable about her time in the White House, that while she may have had to shape herself into the mould of what politics requires of a first lady, it was still a first lady-shaped version of something real.
Afua Hirsch
£10.39 (£12.99 RRP) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshopRead more
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Fiction
A haunting dystopia about climate change denial
A Children’s Bible
Lydia Millet
A Children’s Bible Lydia Millet
A haunting dystopia about climate change denial
Funny and sobering, Millet's 13th novel sees a group of adults settle into a mansion for a heady summer, idling away their time with drugs and sex. They ignore their various children, who hate them ferociously for their selfish decisionmaking, their ambivalence towards a looming catastrophic climate event. When one of the children, Jack, finds a decaying Bible, he begins to see a way of making sense of his disintegrating world. When a hurricane hits, Jack's sister Eve seeks to lead the children to safety as events around them begin to echo those in the Bible.
Sian Cain
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