Crusaders
Dan Jones
Head of Zeus, £25, 512pp
The Dan Jones bandwagon rolls on with this comprehensive and bloodcurdling examination of the Crusades. Jones’s greatest skill as a historian is to bring his subject alive by combining small, often comic detail with the grand cinematic sweep of an epic. At times, you could be reading a great page-turning novel rather than a serious work of nonfiction. A considerable achievement.
Our Times in Rhymes
Sam Leith
Square Peg, £9.99, 129pp
Leith’s sprightly book of satirical verse is subtitled “a prosodical chronicle of our damnable age”. If this has you reaching for a dictionary, don’t worry – what follows is all too comprehensible. Unsurprisingly, given the year’s events, Leith’s barbed lines – “the recent past’s a Whitehall farce / the future’s a dead loss” – have a depressing air, but his witty couplets temper the pessimism, and the work feels nicely up to the minute (despite an unfortunate reference to Clive James still being alive). Edith Pritchett’s illustrations suit the mood perfectly.
Daisy Jones & the Six
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Arrow, £8.99, 416pp (paperback)
This much-praised novel revolves around a 1970s rock band, not a million miles away from Fleetwood Mac, who are recording an album bearing a certain resemblance to Rumours. After they implode in spectacular fashion at a concert in Chicago in 1979, mystery surrounds the tempestuous dynamic that brought them together and then cast them asunder. Telling the story via a series of interview extracts has an intriguing quality to it, and Jenkins Reid has a real feel for the heady atmosphere of the time. But the band’s ersatz lyrics are rather less convincing.
• To order Crusaders, Our Times in Rhymes or Daisy Jones & the Six go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
