Mister Good Times
Norman Jay
Dialogue Books, 357pp, £20
If you’ve been to a music festival or a club in the past two decades, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the joyful DJing of Norman Jay, whose contributions to dance in Britain are among the most significant by anyone alive today. His memoir is full of the heart and spirit he brings to his music, but it also offers a salutary account of growing up as part of the Windrush generation in London’s Notting Hill, the violence and racism he faced, and his success. This book, to use his phrase, has its own “rare groove”.
Two Souls
Henry McDonald
Merrion Press, 272pp, £14.99
At a time when questions of Irish unionism are to the fore again, Henry McDonald’s tough, unsentimental new novel reminds us of the human cost of the Troubles. It focuses on Robbie McManus, a bright young man surrounded by the trigger-happy and the unstable, and his struggles to extricate himself from late-70s Belfast against a backdrop of punk and Bowie’s Low. McDonald’s background in nonfiction (he also writes for the Guardian and Observer) gives this a gripping verisimilitude, and there’s an energy to his prose that makes Two Souls an exhilarating read, even as the events depicted spiral into inevitable violence.
Airhead
Emily Maitlis
Penguin, 384pp, £9.99 (paperback)
Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis is one of the savviest journalists working today, so her part-memoir, part-political commentary is titled with tongue-in-cheek irony. She recounts the interviews of her career, from the great (the Dalai Lama, Bill Clinton), the good (David Attenborough) and the more questionable (Donald Trump, Steve Bannon), offering first-hand insights into the questions that illuminated their characters and the ones they, or she, dodged. A chapter on being the target of a stalker reveals her more vulnerable side in this compelling book.
• To order Mister Good Times, Two Souls or Airhead, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
