The Victorian City: Everyday Life In Dickens' London by Judith Flanders (Atlantic, £9.99)
As Flanders shows in this excellent history, Dickens's London was less a fixed place than a rapidly changing one that meant constant disruption. She also includes some lovely details, like the job of street-sweeping specifically to protect clerks going to work from getting their clothes dirtied by all the new building works.
Justice by Carey Harrison (Skyscraper, £8.99)
A Jewish bookseller narrates this apparently idyllic and aristocratic tale, set in Italy, of the Countess Miri, whose son was sent to Auschwitz on the orders of the local police chief, a man now long dead. Harrison has an impressive pedigree as a novelist, playwright and radio dramatist and doesn't simplify matters for his readers, appropriate for such a deeply questioning story.
The Riddle Of The Labyrinth: The Quest To Crack An Ancient Code And The Uncovering Of A Lost Civilisation by Margalit Fox (Profile, £14.99)
Fox's account of how clay tablets with an unknown script, Linear B, discovered by Victorian archaeologist Arthur Evans in the ruins at Knossos in Crete in 1900, came finally to be decoded and the crucial part the "unsung heroine", classics professor Alice Kober, played in that, is truly mesmerising. It's also a lovely testament to language and the history of linguistics.
The Secret Knowledge by Andrew Crumey (Dedalus Books, £9.99)
Crumey specialises in the novel of ideas, which is an unfashionable thing at the moment. This is a pity, because his tale of parallel composers, Pierre Klauer poised on the edge of the First World War, and today's contemporary David Conroy, is more accessible than some may expect, and more gripping and more encompassing, too.
Lesley McDowell
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