We occasionally use this space to highlight recent arrivals from the UK—books that have not received much review attention here in the United States and may be unknown to Library members. Brief descriptions and some links to reviews are included for nonfiction and fiction, and a list of recently published mysteries, many by well-loved authors, follows. The nonfiction titles cover a wide range: memoirs, essays, WWI, literature, spies, gypsies, Vikings, and more. If you have read any of these, feel free to use the comments feature to tell fellow members your reactions. 

NONFICTION

Bishop, Patrick | The Reckoning: How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land 

Bishop chronicles the controversial 1942 murder of Avraham Stern, the leader of a militant Zionist group called the Stern Gang, by Geoffrey Morton, and the incident’s long aftermath.  The Telegraph called The Reckoning “excellent” and “enthralling.” 

Bostridge, Mark |The Fateful Year: England 1914

The Guardian: “Mark Bostridge's idiosyncratic diary of 1914 is rich with details…the domestic and the quotidian quietly standing proxy for the loud horror and fear one has learned from histories of a wholly different kind. Its power as a narrative, however, comes from an altogether stranger and less physical realm, for this is a book of shadows and portents, a series of harbingers that might have come straight out of a film script…” 

Carey, John |The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books 

A professor of literature at Oxford for 30 years as well as a well-known author and critic, Carey’s autobiography is largely about the enthusiasms he remains devoted to:  teaching, good books, and reading. Read a brief review in the Economist. 

Clarke, Stephen | Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France

Clarke’s biography of Edward VII examines his subject’s love for France and argues that Edward’s hedonistic visits to Paris ultimately exerted a positive influence upon relations between the two countries, including the 1904 signing of The Entente Cordiale. Clarke, the author of 1,000 Years of Annoying the French, has also written, according to the Spectator, “a knock-about romp about the Paris sex trade.”

Green, Jonathon | Odd Job Man: Some Confessions of a Slang Lexicographer

Green is the compiler of the recent epic Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as the author of several books on language and the editor of an excellent oral history, Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground 1961 – 1971. Odd Job Man is a memoir chronicling his 30 years spent as an amateur (in the best sense of the word) researching slang. 

Kirkby, Mandy, ed. | Love Letters of the Great War (introduction by Helen Dunmore)

Lanza Tomasi, Gioacchino | Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa: A Biography through Images (translations by Alessandro Gallenzi and J.G. Nichols)

A biography of the author of the acclaimed novel The Leopard written by Lampedusa’s cousin and heir. The book features unpublished pictures from Lampedusa’s private albums and documents from the family archive. 

Lewis, Peter | A Rogues' Gallery: Off the Record Encounters with Figures of Fame, Folly and Fun, 1950-2000 

A memoir chronicling the long career of a freelance journalist who, it seems, knew everybody. The Spectator: “Lewis is a literary gent from a world that has vanished, where there was respect for the written word, where reflectiveness and manners were prized… where powers of discrimination mattered and conformity was looked at quizzically, even scornfully.” 

Lodge, David | Lives in Writing: Essays 

The Library owns nearly 30 titles by Lodge, including the popular novels Author Author and Man of Parts. In Lives in Writing, Lodge dons his critic's cap and explores the subject of literary biography. Subjects include HG Wells, Simon Gray, and Kingsley Amis. 

Marsh, Henry | Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

The memoirs of a neurosurgeon, “Do No Harm is an elegant series of meditations at the closing of a long career…moving enough to raise tears” (The Telegraph). The Guardian published an admiring review of Do No Harm that you can read here.

Matras, Yaron | I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies

The Guardian described this history of gypsies as “immaculately researched, warm and comprehensive.”

Miller, Sam | A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes

Ambitious in its historical scope, “this wide-ranging and hugely entertaining new book explores the varied motives that brought people to India, their experiences when they got there, and the portraits they provided of the country and its people in the form of letters, diaries, memoirs, travel books, novels, poems and would-be anthropological, archaeological, cultural, and other studies.”—The Spectator

Parker, Philip | The Northmen's Fury: a History of the Viking World

The Telegraph admires this “energetic and intelligent guide to the Viking world” here. 

Phillips, Adam | One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays (introduction by John Banville)  

An eclectic collection of 19 essays spanning the career of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, the author of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, and the recent Becoming Freud. The Guaridian describes Phillips’s prose as “elegant,” and “addictive.” 

Renton, Claudia |Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

A collective biography, based largely on correspondence, of sisters who were often at the center of cultural and political life in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The Wyndhams called Oscar Wilde and Henry James their close friends and were famously painted by John Singer-Sargent. “Renton's book has the wisdom, excitement and psychological depth of a very good novel.” –The Guardian 

Riols, Noreen | The Secret Ministry of Ag. & Fish: My Life in Churchill's School for Spies

Noreen Riols is one of the last surviving members of Churchill’s “secret army” and this is her compelling memoir of time spent in the SOE helping to support the French Resistance. The title derives from Riols telling anyone who asked during the war that she worked for England’s Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. 

Smart, John | Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T.S. Eliot and their Circle

John Hayward (1905-1965) was an influential and controversial editor, critic, bibliographer, and journalist—a Man of Letters in the truest sense. He counted as friends many writers in the Bloomsbury group, plus Wiliam Empson, Dylan Thomas, and most notably T.S. Eliot. A lengthy review of Tarantula’s Web in the TLS can be read here. 

Todd, Selina | The People: The Rise And Fall of the Working Class, 1910-2010

“Based on the first-person accounts of servants, factory workers, miners and housewives, award-winning historian Selina Todd reveals an unexpected Britain …Charting the rise of the working class, through two world wars to their fall in Thatcher's Britain and today, Todd tells their story for the first time, in their own words.”

Tooze, J. Adam | The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931

The Telegraph praised this largely economics-based history of the post-WWI world as “utterly hypnotic,” and “a huge, formidable achievement.” 

Webster, Jason | The Spy with 29 Names: The Story of the Second World War's Most Audacious Double Agent 

Webster tells the fascinating story of Juan Pujol, a Catalan double agent during WWII who was awarded both the iron cross and an MBE. Pujol had a key role in the success of Operation Fortitude, which misled Germany about the timing and location of the invasion of Normandy and was crucial in the allied victory. “Has all the hallmarks of a classic espionage movie.”—The Guardian

Westin, Boel |Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words: The Authorised Biography (translated From the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella)

A new biography of the creator of the Moomin books. 

White, Jerry | Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War

A noted social historian specializing in the history of London, Jerry White has written a fast-paced account of everyday life in London during the war. Richard Davenport-Hines writes in the Guardian that “the sources consulted are wide-ranging, well selected and deftly deployed…and the result is a well-orchestrated polyphony of voices that brings history alive.”

Young, Damon | Voltaire's Vine and Other Philosophies: How Gardens Inspired Great Writers

Young looks at relationships between writers and their gardens: Sartre, Dickinson, Proust, Orwell, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and many more are profiled.  

FICTION

Bailey, Paul |The Prince's Boy

19 year old Dinu, an aspiring writer, moves to Paris in 1927 to soak in the city’s culture. The ghost of Proust looms large in the novel, as Dinu recalls, 40 years later, his initiation into the hidden world that Proust once inhabited. The author of Kitty and Virgil and Uncle Rudolf, Bailey has been shortlisted twice for the Man Booker Prize. “In an underacknowledged career, Bailey has mastered the craft of telling a large story through small but piquant details and knowing where the reader can be left to fill in the spaces. His nimble-footed storytelling moves lightly over great distances of time and space to produce something like a Victorian novel in miniature.”—The Guardian

Barker, Nicola | In the Approaches

The newest novel (her tenth) from the three-time Booker-nominated author of The Yips and Wide Open was praised widely in the UK book review pages…and occasionally dismissed, as well. In short, Barker’s style is not for everyone. Edward Docx in the Guardian: “I loved this book. I hated this book. I was amazed by it. I was bored by it. I thought it beautiful, skilful, profound. I thought it clumsy, callow, silly. I admired its elliptical brilliance and its deep human discerning. I despaired of its jokes and all the stewing self-indulgence.” 

Bennett, Vanora | The White Russian

Bennett’s newest novel (after Figures in Silk and The Queen's Lover) is set in the 1930s Russian émigré community of Paris. 

Bishop, Bernardine | Hidden Knowledge

A posthumous novel from the author of Unexpected Lessons in Love (2013). Margaret Drabble writes in the Observer that “the subtlety and insight with which Bishop explores paedophilia and clerical abuse are exemplary. Through her moral balance and literary expertise, an untouchable subject becomes comprehensible, at times even funny: the correspondence between Father Rog and his beleaguered friend Bishop Pip outdoes Muriel Spark and Evelyn Waugh in high Catholic comedy, yet has no touch of malice or frivolity.”

Blumenfeld, Simon | Jew Boy

Curtis, James | They Drive By Night

Two cult/low-life classic novel reprints (originally published in 1938 and 1935) from London Books, a publisher that specializes in fiction of the pre-war English urban underbelly.  

Hamilton, Hugo | Every Single Minute

Hamilton’s 2003 memoir, The Speckled People, found a welcoming audience at the Society Library. Hamilton’s latest is a novel based on his friendship with another popular-at-NYSL author, Nuala O'Faolain (Almost There, Are You Somebody, etc.), and their time in Berlin during O'Faolain's last days before dying of cancer. 

Keneally, Thomas | Shame and the Captives 

Keneally has written more than 30 novels and is best known for the Booker-winning Schindler’s List. His latest, after 2013’s The Daughters of Mars, is a fictional retelling of a night in 1944 when a group of Japanese prisoners escaped from a POW camp outside the New South Wales town of Cowra.

Kureishi, Hanif | The Last Word

Kureishi’s new one is about an Indian author, Mamoon, nursing a fading career, and the young writer who is writing a biography to revitalize Mamoon’s reputation. Kureishi has written several novels over nearly thirty years, and John Sutherland writes (in the Times) that “this is his best work to date — it is very funny and goes beyond good taste at almost every point.”

Pears, Tim | In the Light of Morning 

Three British parachutists are sent to occupied Slovenia in 1944 to assist the resistance in their battle against the Axis forces. “[T]he characters are beautifully and economically drawn, and he is excellent on the sights and especially the smells of the landscape – the beauty even of a war-torn land.” —The Times

Petterson, Per | Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett)

Petterson’s breakthrough novel Out Stealing Horses has been published in forty-nine languages and won several prizes. Ashes in my Mouth, Sand in my Shoes is Petterson’s debut and the sixth of his works to be translated into English. Told from the perspective of Arvid Jansen (who also appears in I Curse the River of Time), a child living in a working-class district in 1960s Oslo, the narrative takes the form of a series of vignettes with a touching, father-son relationship at its center. 

Roché, Henri Pierre | Jules Et Jim (afterword By François Truffaut; translated by Patrick Evans)

It is somewhat hard to believe that until recently the Library never owned a translation of this novel, the basis for Truffaut’s famous film about a bohemian love triangle in pre-WWI Paris. An interesting article about Roche (who called Duchamp, Satie, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein friends), the novel, and the real life characters upon which it is based can be read here. Also of interest, the recently published Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man: Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood

Vogel, David | Two Novellas: In the Sanatorium & Facing the Sea (translated from the Hebrew by Philip Simpson and Daniel Silverstone)

Vogel (1891-1944) led a peripatetic life, and was killed in Auschwitz in 1944. His work has been compared to Kafka, Joseph Roth, and, in a recent TLS piece, Ronald Firbank. 

Woodward, Gerard | Vanishing

The narrator of Vanishing is Kenneth Brill, an artist from the Heathrow area arrested for treason towards the close of World War II. “This is a huge, complex novel, at turns both blackly funny and bleakly moving, driven by truly original characters, rich in obscure pieces of knowledge, evocative of a long-lost, little-known past, and always absorbing - in a word, a masterpiece” (The Daily Mail). Woodward’s 2004 novel, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, was shortlisted for the Man-Booker Prize. 

Zweig, Stefan | The Society of the Crossed Keys: Selections from the Writings of Stefan Zweig (translated By Anthea Bell)

The work of prolific Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) has seen a revival of interest in the English-speaking world over the last dozen or so years, including a recent Wes Anderson film inspired by his work.  Internationally popular during his lifetime, current opinion on Zweig is split: master of short fiction, or lightweight popularizer of others’ ideas and innovations? The Society of the Crossed Keys, translated by noted author and translator Anthea Bell, serves as a fine introduction to his work. 

MYSTERIES

Appignanesi, Lisa | Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness

Bauer, Belinda | The Facts of Life And Death 

Carter, M. J. | The Strangler Vine

Delaney, Luke | The Toy Taker 

Enger, Thomas | Scarred (translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund)

Flanders, Judith | Writers' Block

Fyfield, Frances | Casting the First Stone

Gimenez, Mark | Con Law

Hannah, Sophie | The Telling Error

Harvey, John | Darkness, Darkness 

James, Peter | Dead Letter Drop

Kelly, Erin | The Ties that Bind 

Kernick, Simon | Stay Alive

Läckberg, Camilla | Buried Angels (translated from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally)

Macbride, Stuart | A Song for the Dying

Massie, Allan | Cold Winter in Bordeaux

May, Peter | Entry Island

Minier, Bernard | The Frozen Dead (translated from the French by Alison Anderson)

Naughtie, James | The Madness of July

Nesbø, Jo | Cockroaches (translated From the Norwegian by Don Bartlett)

Oswald, James | The Hangman's Song

Vargas, Fred | Dog will have his Day (translated from the French by Sian Reynolds)

Welsh, Louise | A Lovely Way To Burn

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir | The Silence of the Sea (translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb)