The Cruelest of All Mothers by Mary Dunn (Fordham University Press, £31). A fascinating study of motherhood and the Christian tradition as exemplified by the life of a 17th-century Ursuline nun, Marie de l’Incarnation. Professor Dunn’s work explains the context of the nun’s seeming abandonment of her 11-year-old son, Claude (he later became a Benedictine monk) to enter the convent. Reflecting on her own three sons and her daughter’s diagnosis with a rare genetic disorder, the author brings understanding and critical perceptiveness to her study of another mother nearly 400 years ago.
Safe Passage by Ida Cook (Harlequin, £8.99). First published in 1950 and now reissued with a foreword by biographer Anne Sebba, this delightful, unaffected account tells the story of the Cook sisters, Ida and Louise, and how they spent their time and their money rescuing Jewish families from Hitler before the war. Both unmarried and with a passion for opera which had led them to Germany in the 1920s, they were helped financially by Ida’s improbable success as a writer of romantic fiction for Mills & Boon. Her memoir demonstrates the enduring kindness of the human spirit.
A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson (Chatto and Windus, £16.99). In this memoir Juliet Nicolson, daughter of the publisher Nigel Nicolson and granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West, traces the line of strong (and difficult) women in her family. The most interesting part is, naturally, when she describes her own relationship with her mother and her parents’ problematic marriage. In the background there is Knole, the ancestral home of the Sackvilles, as well as Sissinghurst, where the author grew up and which was dominated by the garden created by Vita. A book of humour as well as sadness.
The Light of Day by Eric Ambler (British Library, £8.99). Eric Ambler can rightly lay claim to being the godfather of the spy novel – without him John le Carré and Len Deighton are impossible to conceive. Ambler was always the most subtle of writers, tempering his politics with humanity, and The Light of Day is one of his most enjoyable novels. Filmed (not very well) as Topkapi, the story concerns petty thief Arthur Simpson, a man so ignorant of his own folly he is similar to the commentator in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. This British Library reissue brings the novel back into print in a highly desirable and lavish edition.
Brit Noir by Barry Forshaw (No Exit, £8.99). Forshaw, a crime reviewer for the Independent and the Financial Times, continues his erudite mapping of contemporary crime fiction by moving his sights from Scandinavia to Britain. British crime fiction is incredibly diverse and Forshaw wisely breaks the book down into geographical sections, situating each writer in the milieu they write about, thus emphasising how important location is to the genre. Funny, analytical and always interesting, Forshaw has created that rare thing: an extremely readable and informative reference guide.
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