DOCTOR WHO: THE DROSTEN’S CURSE

A.L. Kennedy (BBC Books, £7.99)

Every so often, the BBC commissions a prestigious literary author to pen a Doctor Who novel, and lifelong fan A.L. Kennedy hits the mark far more accurately than did Michael Moorcock, who never quite succeeded in striking a suitable tone. The Drosten’s Curse is set in 1978, which means Tom Baker’s Doctor, and is set in Arbroath, where a telepathic field is wiping and implanting memories and even clouding the Doctor’s gargantuan brain. From the opening scene, in which a golfer is devoured by a bunker, her barbed humour recalls the Douglas Adams era, not least in a villain going by the Adams pseudonym “David Agnew”. It’s whimsical and absurd, with an undercurrent of existential horror, and Kennedy captures the vanity and iconic stature of Tom Baker’s Doctor, who finds afternoon tea with an old lady every bit as enticing as battling monsters. Above all, she has an affinity for the moral and emotional universe the Doctor inhabited, not just its iconography.

THE DEAN’S DIARIES

David Purdie (Luath Press, £8.99)

This book has been compiled from blog entries purporting to be the work of the Dean of Edinburgh’s mythical St Andrew’s College, situated on the corner of George IV Bridge and Chambers Street. A venerable academic institution, it has no undergraduates but is populated entirely by unconventional dons engaged in equally idiosyncratic research, such as the creation of an artificial black hole which escaped and rolled off in the direction of the City Chambers. It sounds like a rum place, with “its fierce political incorrectness and general eccentricity”, and many of these tall tales are surely based on genuine academics he’s known. But Professor Purdie, renowned for his public speaking, does stray from his initial premise quite a bit, many of these stories, which namecheck the likes of Archbishop Runcie, Peter Ustinov and Alexander McCall Smith, betraying their origins in well-honed after-dinner anecdotes. It’s all very gentle academic humour, never too blue or too edgy, illustrated by veteran cartoonist Bob Dewar.

MAD MEN & BAD MEN

Sam Delaney (Faber, £9.99)

The son of an advertising executive, Delaney was fascinated by the way the stuffy world of politics had joined forces with the looser, more hedonistic culture of advertising. In this book he traces their association, from the earliest fumbling forays by Macmillan in the 1950s, through the Thatcher years, when the bond was cemented, and the New Labour era, associated now with the notorious “Demon Eyes” poster. Many of the participants are still alive and willing to talk (though not the Saatchis, sadly), regaling Delaney with such anecdotes as the time when a “flushed” and “animated” Ted Heath and Willie Whitelaw unknowingly ingested amphetamines which had been sprinkled over canapes to liven up a meeting. Interestingly, many of those interviewed believe that the ads, even the iconic “Labour Isn’t Working”, made virtually no difference to the outcome of elections, but in this breezy, very readable book, Delaney does argue that the advertising industry brought greater rigour and focus to political parties.

THE NATASHAS

Yelena Moskovich (Serpent’s Tail, £11.99)

“There are people who leave their bodies and their bodies go on living without them. These people are named Natasha.” So Parisian jazz singer Beatrice is told by her mysterious nightly visitor, Polina. Natasha, it turns out, is also the name given by sex-traffickers to women who, in a less metaphysical sense, have their bodies taken from them. This debut novel by a Ukrainian playwright who now lives in Paris is a hallucinatory torrent of imagery and ideas that moves entirely according to its own rules. A chorus of Natashas comment on the action as Beatrice resists being defined by her sexuality and as gay Mexican actor Cesar, cast as a serial killer, begins to identify a little too much with his character during rehearsals. Moskovich explores the relationship between our identities and our physical selves in an experimental, fragmented narrative, obstinately refusing to reach an orthodox resolution but nevertheless casting a beguiling spell that beckons deeper into its strangeness.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT