Incredible life of Mohamed Salah - world’s best-known Muslim player

Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women
Joan Smith
William Collins, £22

Already winning top marks for its title, campaigning journalist Joan Smith’s revisionist history looks at 23 of the wives, mothers and daughters of Roman emperors – from Augustus to Nero, not forgetting the insane Caligula – and shows what miserable lives they led. Believing that fewer than six of them died of natural causes, she reveals the brutal culture of violence and oppression in which these “privileged” women existed, and in so doing overturns millennia of historical misogyny.

Bill Clinton (Image: free) Citizen: My Life After the White House
Bill Clinton
Hutchinson Heinemann, £30

In January 2001, at the age of 54, Bill Clinton became an ordinary man again. After 30 years in politics, eight of them as President of the US, he was suddenly adrift. How to make himself useful, and find meaning for the rest of his career? Citizen is his account of what he did next: becoming a philanthropist involved in galvanising support for survivors of natural disasters within the USA and in countries such as India, Indonesia, South Africa. It is also a record of the changing face of American democracy, including frank recollections of Hillary Clinton’s bruising presidential campaign of 2016, and his thoughts on the January 6 insurrection of 2021. The sequel to his biography, My Life, this memoir is a valuable political, social and personal commentary on quarter of a century of global change. 

The Position of Spoons: and other Intimacies
Deborah Levy
Hamish Hamilton, £20

In this collection of essays, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy offers an intellectual and very personal memoir of sorts. Tracing her life, and setting it against those of her muses – among them writer Marguerite Duras and artist Paula Rego – she examines the influences that have shaped her. Subjects covered include suburbia, gender, consumerism and, naturally, mortality.

Story of the Century: Wagner and the Creation of the Ring
Michael Downes
Faber & Faber, £22

Why does Wagner’s controversial Ring Cycle matter? Conductor and writer Michael Downes, Director of Music at the University of St Andrews, illuminates how and why Wagner came to compose The Ring of the Nibelung, and what his masterpiece signifies.  

Nigel Farage drove Brexit (Image: free) Out: How Brexit Got Done and the Tories were Undone
Tim Shipman
William Collins, £30

Following on from No Way Out, the Sunday Times’s chief political commentator Tim Shipman offers a clear-eyed and shocking reprise of the post-Theresa May government. Covering the Johnson and Truss premierships, he focuses on the shenanigans around “getting Brexit done”, and the abject mess in No. 10 that was the Covid-era administration. If May and her predecessors’ tenures could be loosely compared to the West Wing and The Thick of It, Westminster under Johnson was Game of Thrones.

Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks
Orhan Pamuk
Faber & Faber, £35

I had no idea Pamuk kept notebooks, interleaved with beautiful illustrations reflecting his surroundings, his workaday existence as a novelist, and his world travels. With daily commentary on the difficulties and satisfactions of writing, and containing dialogues between him and his fictional characters, Memories of Distant Mountains, which covers a decade, also addresses the current political situation in Turkey. A guidebook to the imagination of this remarkable Nobel Prize-winner, it will offer consolation and encouragement for others toiling over plot and prose.

FICTION PICKS

Killing Time
Alan Bennett
Faber & Faber, £10

Set in a classy council care home called Hill Topp House, Bennett’s comic novella takes place during the Covid pandemic. Even though the disease is scything through the residents of what he describes as “less of a home and more of a club”, it’s not all gloom. In the midst of the chaos and confusion, residents can slip their leash. Rich with Bennett’s dry humour, this report from the front-line of old age is both an insight into and an inspiration for the elderly. “‘Violet? She’ll be having a little lie-down,’ said Mrs McBryde. ‘She likes to give her pacemaker a rest. I’ll rout her out.’”

Jonathan Coe (Image: free) The Proof of My Innocence
Jonathan Coe
Viking, £20

In present-day Britain, during the tenure of a prime minister who lasts a mere seven weeks, a young graduate working in Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and living with her parents wonders if life can get more tedious. That swiftly changes when a family friend comes to stay and she is drawn into his investigation  of a sinister think tank. Dating to the 1980s at Cambridge University, this group threatens to push the government into a more extreme position, and is primed for action. When a body turns up at a Cotswold conference, things turn even more serious. Described as “a political thriller wrapped in a murder mystery”, Coe’s satirical comedy sounds just the sort of novel for dark autumn nights, although perhaps rather too close to home to be described as comfort reading.  

The Caretaker
Ron Rash
Canongate, £16.99

Voted one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2023, The Caretaker, by award-winning American poet and writer Ron Rash, opens in North Carolina in 1951. Young Jacob Hampton is disinherited for marrying Naomi, an uneducated hotel maid. When he is called up to fight in Korea, he asks his friend Blackburn Gant to take care of his pregnant wife. Blackburn, who tends the local cemetery, is as much an outsider as Naomi, and as their friendship blossoms in Jacob’s absence, the lives of all three characters become irrevocably complicated.