The Making Of Home by Judith Flanders (Atlantic, £9.99)
Flanders’s excellent history of the home debunks several myths: that the public and the private areas inside were separated after the Industrial Revolution, and that women were forced indoors too. Instead she shows with attention to portraits that very often lied about the circumstances they painted, how home was always a messy mix of the two.
A Spool Of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Vintage, £7.99)
Tyler’s stories of American family life very often skirt just the right side of ‘soap’, but this generational novel about middle-class married couple Abby and Red, how they met in the late 1950s and the children they have, tips over the edge. From the gossipy beginning, relationships and their consequences dominate a dialogue-heavy narrative.
The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig At The End Of The World by George Prochnik (Granta, £9.99)
This is a lovely biography in the style of the ‘in search of’ approach that has become so popular lately. Prochnik, trying to understand why Zweig didn’t retain his extraordinary fame in the US and the UK after his death by suicide in 1941, explores the writer’s final years in exile, to give us a painstaking and often painful account.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (Picador Classic, £8.99)
This re-release of McCarthy’s 1985 novel 30 years after publication is a useful reminder about the fortunes of a writer, given that what is now described as a ‘masterpiece’ was once out of print. Set in the 1940s but also futuristic in tone, its immediacy is conveyed by external description and dialogue between the homeless Kid and those he meets.
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