In this week's rundown of the Mirror Book Club's best reads, we review an engrossing biography which paints a picture of the pre-war art world of Britain.
A plane explodes in a thriller which twists and turns its way to a brilliant finale.
Life in a Cornish fishing town is the focus of another of our top reads and we also review a stylish globe-trotting cookbook.
Circles & Squares, by Caroline Maclean
Bloomsbury, £30
In this engrossing, superbly written biography, Caroline Maclean explores the vanished world of the Hampstead Modernists of the 1930s. Her cast list reads like a “who’s who” of the pre-war British art world. They lived and worked together, formed friendships and rivalries, and swapped wives and husbands.
Circles & Squares opens with an account of the relationship between sculptor Barbara Hepworth and painter Ben Nicholson, the latter already the father of three small children. They were married to other people when they met on a group holiday on the Norfolk coast.
Their bed-hopping and creative partnership was not ideal for Nicholson’s long-suffering wife, Winifred. “It is hard to imagine how she coped with the new baby and two small children and being told by her husband he had fallen in love with a sculptor 10 years younger than her.” And she probably wasn’t thrilled with Nicholson’s suggestion that all three of them co-habit.
They both set up studios in and around Hampstead. There, they met other creatives exploring “experiments in living” and Maclean covers them in later chapters: French painter Piet Mondrian; sculptor Henry Moore; and the founder of the Bauhaus movement, Walter Gropius, who had fled Hitler’s Germany.
These Hampstead Modernists were united by rejection of the past, their aesthetic inspired by the car, aeroplane, and the angular lines of industry. And with that they changed the face of British art.
BY HUSTON GILMORE
Power Play, by Tony Kent
Elliot & Thompson, £8.99
A plane from London to New York explodes, killing hundreds, and a Muslim refugee confesses to planting the bomb. But controversial US presidential candidate Dale Victor, way ahead of the president in the polls, was among the dead. Criminal barrister Michael Devlin is asked to represent the suspect but believes there’s more to this than terrorism. And UN intelligence agent Joe Dempsey investigates a theory that powerful people committed the murder. There’s twist after twist as it builds to a brilliant finale.
BY JON COATES
The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury, £8.99
Ann Patchett’s new novel explores the dysfunctional dynamics of the Conroy family, their story unfolding over five decades in family home The Dutch House.
Maeve was 10 and her brother Danny three when their mother left and it fell to Maeve to mother her little brother. Their rock-solid relationship is further cemented after their father dies and callous stepmum Andrea forces them to leave, plunging the rich siblings into a life of poverty. As they fixate on their lost home, will they find peace? An engrossing read.
BY EITHNE FARRY
Dark, Salt, Clear: Life In A Cornish Fishing Town, by Lamorna Ash
Bloomsbury, £16.99
Lamorna Ash, a Londoner with Cornish forebears, takes a train to Penzance where she immerses herself in life in Newlyn, Britain’s largest fishing port, and tells the riveting tale of eight days spent at sea on a trawler with a crew of fishermen. Battling homesickness and seasickness, she sets herself to this toughest and most perilous of trades, learning to haul, gut and pack fish. It’s a portrait of a place that, while sometimes insular, is also community-minded.
BY CAROLINE SANDERSON
The Roasting Tin Around The World, by Rukmini Iyer
Square Peg, £16.99
Rukmini Iyer abandoned a career as a lawyer to become a food stylist and recipe writer. Craving flavourful meals that are easy to make after a busy day, she started devising dinners where ingredients are cooked together in a roasting tin. Her latest offering takes a whistlestop tour of world cuisine, her “chop and chuck” traybakes making the most of easy-to-source ingredients. Highlights are American creole-spiced crab tarts, Venezuelan beef, and spiced paneer with potatoes.
BY EITHNE FARRY
Join the Mirror Book Club
There’s never been a better time to get lost in a good book… so we’d love you to join the friendly Mirror Book Club community on Facebook.
Members share their thoughts on the current book of the month and post recommendations of other books they’ve enjoyed, from thrillers and romances to memoirs. We all exchange book news and views.
So if you enjoy stories and the company of fellow bookworms then we think you’ll love our group too.
Mirror Book Club members have chosen crime novel Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner as our new book of the month.
A young woman disappears and troubled, lonely DS Manon Bradshaw takes on the high-profile case.
Adding to the pressure, the woman’s pompous father is close friends with the Home Secretary and both men stick their oar in. Manon throws herself into the mystery to distract herself from a disastrous love life. Can she get to the bottom of it before a missing persons case becomes a murder investigation?
We’d love you to give Missing, Presumed a read and let the Mirror Book Club know what you think. We’ll print your feedback on these pages on May 22.
You can share your thoughts in the Mirror Book Club Facebook group.
We have 25 copies of Missing, Presumed to give away. For a chance to win, simply ‘like’ the post announcing the giveaway in our Facebook group before April 24.
