The Fight For Beauty by Fiona Reynolds (Oneworld, £9.99)
When politicians debate preservation of the countryside nowadays, they use words like biodiversity and sustainability, but the concept of beauty no longer seems to apply. It’s too airy-fairy, too hard to quantify. Fiona Reynolds wants to make that word an acceptable part of environmental discourse once more. It wasn’t always this way: in both the Victorian and postwar eras, beauty was acknowledged as being part of the value of a landscape. Reynolds charts here the growth of a consciousness, spearheaded by the likes of Wordsworth and Ruskin in the 19th century, and how it either chimed or clashed with the prevailing moods of the times. Drawing on her experiences with various campaigning organisations, including 11 years as Director General of the National Trust, she discusses the battle between progress and preservation in several aspects of the environment. Beauty is a subjective thing hard to reach agreement on, but Reynolds deserves credit for at least trying to argue for its consideration.
The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell (Quercus, £7.99)
The arrival of 20-year-old American Samantha Whipple at the fogey-ish Old College, Oxford, causes a ripple of excitement. She’s the daughter of the late author Tristan Whipple and the only living descendant of the Brontës, so she has a complex, ambivalent attitude towards literature which stirs up conflict with her tutor, James Timothy Orville III, a confrontational, opinionated academic who very soon looks like he’s shaping up to be her Mr Rochester. Samantha’s life is dominated by the Brontë connection, so as she’s trying to figure out the identity of the person who is leaving books for her – books she thought were destroyed in a fire – she also has to deal with an academic her father despised who wants her to help him track down the missing Brontë estate. Wittily and breezily written, The Madwoman Upstairs boasts a well-packed but not overstuffed plot, and it’s one of those rare novels that will delight equally lovers of books and of romance.
The Last Painting Of Sara De Vos by Dominic Smith (Allen & Unwin, £8.99)
In 1630s Amsterdam, Sara de Vos is one of a handful of women admitted to the Guild of St Luke’s and allowed to work as a painter. Grief-stricken over the death of her daughter, she paints a melancholy masterpiece. In New York, in 1957, the painting is stolen from the penthouse of lawyer Marty de Groot and replaced by a forgery, painted to order by art restorer Ellie Shipley. Fast forward to the Millennium, and both the original and the copy surface simultaneously, threatening to expose Ellie’s past misdemeanours and wreck her reputation. Dominic Smith laces each of these three time periods with suspense as to where they’re going to go next, and each carefully woven strand supports the others in the telling of how two painters, centuries apart, are pressured by a male-dominated profession into doing things they otherwise wouldn’t. Smith’s well-researched descriptions of forging techniques add a sheen of authenticity to an already highly absorbing story.
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