From a family road trip in outer space to Professor Snape’s secret diaries, what was new in 2022

NON-FICTION THE ESCAPE ARTIST

Jonathan Freedland

John Murray £20

The extraordinary story of an extraordinary man. On April 10, 1944, Walter Rosenberg (aka Rudolf Vrba) managed to escape from Auschwitz, but that was only the start of his mission. He was determined that the world should know the truth about the Nazis’ death factory. The responses of some of those in power to his report are among the most shocking parts of a compelling book filled with horrific detail.

TOURISTS

Lucy Lethbridge Bloomsbury £20

Travel broadens the mind, they say, but not always in a good way. In the summer of 1815, it was all the rage to head for the battlefield of Waterloo in search of a souvenir – ideally a bone or a tooth. A mid-19th Century guide to Naples suggested attending a pauper’s funeral. In 1919, tourists travelled to Ypres in the hope of experiencing something of the ‘thrill’ of the First World War. What fun!

This hugely entertaining and often very amusing history of British tourism focuses on sightseers from the

1820s to the 1970s and their frequently peculiar whims and wants.

THE SIEGE OF LOYALTY HOUSE Jessie Childs Bodley Head £25

Basing House – or Loyalty House, as it became known – in Hampshire was one of the largest strongholds held for the King and his allies against the armies of Parliament during the English Civil War. Actors, astrologers, writers and musicians who had served the court fled to it. Childs draws on unpublished manuscripts and the voices of dozens of men, women and children to tell this thrilling tale of war.

QUEEN OF OUR TIMES Robert Hardman Macmillan £20

Hardman has 30 years’ experience of interviewing members of the Royal Family. His brilliant biography of Elizabeth II was published in March, before her death, but has now been updated to cover the end of her life. Packed full of rich detail and revealing anecdotes, it is the result of having years of extraordinary Royal access.

ABYSS

Max Hastings William Collins £30 The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was, says Hastings, the most perilous event in history, a period when, for a few terrifying days, nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union appeared almost inevitable. This chronicle of the world teetering on the brink of apocalypse grips from the outset, and is a timely read in an era when a new confrontation between nuclear superpowers seems increasingly likely.

THE WRATH TO COME Sarah Churchwell Apollo £27.99

Churchwell examines the history and legacy of

Gone With The Wind, both Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestseller and the hit

1939 film based on it. She believes that unravelling the DNA of the story, which romanticises the old American South, can help us understand American political and cultural life today. Racial and gender politics, controversies over Confederate statues, the popularity of Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement, it’s all here. Fascinating and thought-provoking.

THE SONG OF THE CELL Siddhartha Mukherjee Bodley Head £25

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mukherjee tells the story of cellular biology, from the 17th Century discovery of the cell – the tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units that make up every living thing – to the emerging discipline of cell therapy, which could provide incredible medical breakthroughs in the treatment of all kinds of serious illnesses.

THE NEW PURITANS Andrew Doyle Constable £20

Doyle is the brains behind the comedy woke warrior

Titania McGrath, but this is a deadly serious account of the contemporary culture wars. Doyle looks at the illiberalism of the so-called ‘social justice’ movement, which seeks to ‘cancel’ anyone who has the temerity to disagree with its rigid belief system, and argues that it is more akin to a religion than a logically thought-out political philosophy. He considers how it has risen so rapidly to capture so many political, cultural and corporate institutions.

MADLY, DEEPLY

Alan Rickman Canongate £25

BEYOND THE WAND Tom Felton

Ebury Spotlight £20

Two very different books by stars of the Harry Potter films. The late Rickman’s portrayal of Professor Snape was just one role in a long career. His frequently waspish diaries, never intended for publication, provide a compelling insight into his life and work.

For Felton, his part as the awful Draco Malfoy has been his main role to date and his book is a must for

Potter fans – a candid account of working on the movies but also of their impact on his life.

NON FICTION BACK IN THE DAY

Melvyn Bragg

Sceptre £25

Bragg’s (above) poignant memoir about growing up in the Cumbrian market town of Wigton evokes a lost world of workingclass life – a world of outside loos, oncea-week baths and pubs murky with fag smoke. He recalls rites of passage such as first love, while also telling the story of how a lad who could have left school at 15 and worked in a factory ended up going to Oxford.

FICTION DEMON COPPERHEAD

Barbara Kingsolver

Faber £20

Kingsolver has long been a Dickens devotee, and her retelling of David Copperfield, set in Appalachia at the start of the current opioid crisis, is a triumph. Its opening paragraph is full of the ‘gallows humour and lapelgrabbing verve’ that our critic loved, and throughout it’s powered by larger-than-life characters, a deep sense of place and electrifying twists of fate.

OUR MISSING HEARTS Celeste Ng

Abacus £20

Enfolded within this intricate dystopian fable is a paean to the power of books and all who love them, from readers and writers to humble librarians, who’ll turn out to be part of an underground resistance movement. Its hero is Bird, a boy on a quest to find his long-lost mother, mining the stories she told him when he was small for clues.

LUCY BY THE SEA

Elizabeth Strout Viking £14.99

You needn’t have read Strout’s earlier novels about author Lucy Barton to delight in this latest instalment. It begins as Covid arrives in Manhattan and, at the insistence of her exasperating ex-husband, Lucy retreats with him to Maine. Reflections on family, loss and a tough and troubling childhood fill pages enlivened by wry wisdom and humour.

SHRINES OF GAIETY Kate Atkinson Doubleday £20

Follow Atkinson to 1920s Soho, where the inimitable Nellie Coker rules over a demi-monde teeming with starlets, gangsters and toffs. She has ambitions for her children, but with enemies on both sides of the law, can she survive to fulfil them? Exuberant, immersive storytelling featuring intrigue and betrayal is matched with wit

and tenderness.

YOUNG MUNGO Douglas Stuart Picador £16.99

Our critic called Booker-winner Stuart’s second novel ‘bleakly brilliant’. Like his first, it’s set in 1990s Glasgow, where shy teenager Mungo falls for a boy from the other side of the sectarian divide. Bigotry, violence and a thoroughly sinister fishing trip ensue, yet no matter how dark it gets, writing this vivid and heartrending creates its own radiance.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY Bonnie Garmus

Doubleday £16.99

The 1960s trappings and idiosyncratic wit of this year’s blockbuster debut are instantly appealing, but it’s also a narrative with real bite. Its heroine is Elizabeth Zott, a whip-smart scientist who accidentally becomes the host of a hit TV cookery series, using it to empower housewives across America. Uplifting and irresistibly zany, the novel also features a show-stealing mutt named Six-Thirty.

SUNDIAL Catriona Ward Viper £8.99

The Mojave Desert provides a menacing backdrop in the new novel from the author of The Last House On Needless Street. Once its mother and daughter protagonists are installed in the wilderness, what starts out as suburban domestic noir morphs into a taut, twisty tale of psychological horror, drawing on toxic family relationships and CIA experiments.

ACT OF OBLIVION

Robert Harris

Hutchinson Heinemann £22

Colonels Edward Whalley and William Goffe were among the signatories of Charles I’s death warrant. In Restoration-era England they became wanted men, and Harris’s classy historical thriller imagines the fugitives being pursued across the Atlantic by a fictional official intent on bringing them to justice. It’s pacy and tense, and the pungently evoked past offers up some shrewd present-day parallels.

BAD ACTORS Mick Herron Baskerville £18.99

The latest book in Herron’s satirical espionage series, this is an ingeniously structured caper that finds his misfit ‘slow horses’ tasked with foiling a Russian intelligence operation in Westminster. Herron seems primed to take up John le Carré’s mantle while simultaneously channelling the best of Ian Fleming.

A WORLD OF CURIOSITIES

Louise Penny

Hodder & Stoughton £16.99

The 18th title in the Gamache series, but newbies needn’t worry about starting with Penny’s chief inspector on a case that will stir up tragic memories and trigger fresh fears in the Quebec village of Three Pines. Look out for hidden messages, puzzles within puzzles, and some resonant ruminations on forgiveness and redemption.