This book will establish Gray as a wonderfully eccentric and visionary one-off. Her rackety, reclusive life is brilliantly realised in Fasting and Feasting by Adam Federman (Chelsea Green). Patience Gray (1917-2005) is the great original British cook and food writer. It’s hard to imagine anything that will do Bowie better justice. David Bowie: A Life (Preface) suits the shape-shifting, beguiling, enigmatic complexities of its subject perfectly. Dylan Jones made absolutely the right decision to frame his superb life of David Bowie as a multi-voiced oral biography. Here they are – not random narcoleptic scribblings but direct pellucid access to the great man’s unconscious. Over a period of a few weeks in 1964 Nabokov wrote down his dreams, nightly. Insomniac Diaries David Bowie: A Life Fasting and FeastingĪs a Vladimir Nabokov completist, I could not resist Insomniac Diaries: Experiments with Time (ed. This truly is one of the best books I’ve read in years: funny, outrageous, touching, intimate, glorious. Iranian-born, German-bred, Muslim novelist/intellectual Kermani travels the globe looking at significant (and not so significant) Christian artworks. Navid Kermani’s Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity (Polity).
Top highlights: when Goldie’s boa constrictor decides to try to eat him after he staggers home from the pub smelling like a kebab and when his favourite piece of custom-made jewellery is stolen – right from under his nose – by dodgy Russian airport officials.
A fabulous, whirling kaleidoscope of music, memory and trauma. He’s an amazing storyteller, a gorgeous writer, a great, generous, compassionate thinker, and – quite rightly – one of the world’s most influential mental healthcare practitioners. When Yalom publishes something – anything – I buy it, and he never disappoints.
Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir (Piatkus) by Irvin D Yalom.