The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99)
There’s almost a fairytale aspect to this story from 2000, now a major film, of the prodigal returning, in this case the prodigal daughter. Tilly is the dressmaker from a small Australian town, who goes home after working for Paris fashion houses. But she’s more like a wicked stepmother in some ways, a fun and dark creation.
The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky (W.W. Norton, £9.99)
The lovely thing about this book is that it shows superbly well how connected we all are, in a global way. That the word ‘ketchup’, for example, is actually Chinese, meaning a kind of fish sauce, but carried by traders back to Europe and gradually evolving into a tomato sauce, is just one of the many fascinating facts it contains.
Compass: Stories on Distance edited by Belinda McKeon (Tramp Press, £12)
Dublin-based independent publisher Tramp Press have commissioned a collection of short stories by writers like Kevin Barry, Suzanne Scanlon, Niven Govinden and Ross Raisin, that embraces experimentation without being tricksy, and makes the subject of ‘distance’, which isn’t necessarily the most compelling of themes, look easy to write about. Essential reading.
I Call Myself A Feminist: The View From Twenty-five Women Under Thirty edited by Victoria Pepe, Rachel Holmes, Amy Annette, Alice Stride, Martha Mosse (Virago, £13.99)
This is a volume of extremely short essays by and for a younger generation discovering feminism for themselves. It’s a real joy to see young women taking up feminism in such positive ways, and the shortness may be deliberately designed for the Twitter era. I couldn’t help but wish, though, for a little more substance.
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