It's time to curl up with a good read

JANUARY

Author Edna O’Brien has always been attracted to writers writing about other writers. And in Byron (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99) she has a go herself, offering an understanding of one of our greatest poets through the people who loved him and whom he loved.

Pale and dark-eyed, with a deformed foot, Lord George Gordon Byron held both men and women in his thrall. He scandalised society with his affairs and excessive lifestyle but won its heart with the magnetism, passion and intellect that is reflected in his verse. His tragic death at 36 sealed his reputation as a live-fast, die-young rebel and genius.

Another live-fast die-young genius was the musician Buddy Holly. When he was killed in a plane crash at just 22, songwriter Don McLean described it as “the day the music died”. But 50 years on, Holly’s influence is still evident in the music charts and he is the subject of a West End musical that looks set to run and run.

John Gribbin has been a fan of Buddy Holly since he was 12 and in Not Fade Away (Icon Books, £12.99) he celebrates the star’s brief life and musical legacy including – uniquely – a full and detailed account of every Holly recording session.

After the story of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, comes Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore. In Wedlock (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99) Wendy Moore reveals how Mary, one of Britain’s wealthiest heiresses, was lured into marriage with Irish soldier Andrew Stoney Robinson who robbed her of her children, her inheritance and her self-worth, starving and imprisoning her in her own home. But she escaped and survived to divorce her husband and see him imprisoned for her abduction. The remarkable story of one woman’s triumph over years of appalling violence and abuse.

The story of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood spans the second half of the 19th century, a period of huge historical and artistic change in Britain and Europe. The Brotherhood, who included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Morris outraged social conventions with their bohemian lifestyle, love triangles and ravishing models.

In Desperate Romantics (John Murray, £20) television producer Franny Moyle retells their story through letters and diaries revealing how many of them ended up in the grip of madness, addiction and suicide.

On a gentler note is The Longest Trip Home (Hodder, £18.99) a memoir from John Grogan, the author of the phenomenally successful Marley & Me. As a child Grogan struggled against his strict Catholic upbringing, choosing a path that led him away from the church and his parents’ understanding.

It took the onset of his mother’s dementia and his father’s terminal illness to bring the family together again. In discovering the love and deep emotional ties that bind children and their parents, John also came to recognise how highly regarded his father was in their community. Seeing his father through the eyes of others helped him appreciate just what he was about to lose. A poignant and moving journey told with love.

An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99) is the biography of the fictitious artist Jennet Mallow. An enchanting life story from her Yorkshire childhood through the austerity of the post-war years to marriage, children and artistic success. Exquisitely written: the descriptions of Jennet’s work, paintings that never existed and the description of colour are breathtaking.

The Heretic’s Daughter by Kathleen Kent (MacMillan, £14.99) is the first of two novels to be published this spring about the Salem Witch Trials, both by descendants of Salem witches. Kent tells the story of her ancestor Martha Carrier who was hanged at the height of the turmoil.

The narrator is Martha’s daughter Sarah, who through the course of the novel comes to realise her mother is not the harsh unyielding woman she has always believed but a woman of courage, integrity and individuality who maintains her innocence even though it costs her her life.

Old lawyers never die, they just lose their appeal. But not John Grisham. In The Associate (Century, £18.99) he is once again on top form. Kyle McAvoy is one of the brightest law students of his generation with a dazzling career before him. Then a secret from his past threatens to destroy him for ever. Blackmailed into spying on his employers can Kyle use his cunning and intellect to extricate himself from the criminals controlling him and emerge with his career and reputation intact?

The Girl Who Played With Fire (Quercus, £16.99) is the second in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy that opened with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Computer genius Lisa Salander is using her skills as a hacker to wage war on the sex trafficking industry. But she’s barely begun before she’s embroiled in a double murder and wanted for a third. On the run from both the police and the ruthlessly violent traffickers she must unearth the truth before her pursuers reach her first.

FEBRUARY

This month sees the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. And in a blizzard of publicity two books stand out. Darwin’s Island by the eminent geneticist Steve Jones (Little Brown, £20) and Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore (Penguin, £2).

Subtitled The Galapagos In The Garden Of England, Jones’s accessible and informative book focuses on the forty years of Darwin’s life following the publication of The Origin of Species, when he swapped his voyages on The Beagle for exploration of the British Isles. Desmond and Moore are already the authors of an acclaimed biography of Darwin.

They have used their insight into his life along with previously untapped sources to offer an new explanation for how Darwin came to revolutionise our understanding of human origins. The Sacred Cause of the title is the abolition of slavery. Darwin was an abolitionist and, the authors argue, it was this moral drive that led to the development of the theories that prove that all races are united by descent.

Artist, The Philosopher And The Warrior by Paul Strathern (Jonathan Cape, £2) is the gripping account of the relationship between Leonardo da Vinci the artist, Niccolo Machiavelli the philosopher, and Cesare Borgia the warrior, and the influence these three men had on the Italian Renaissance and how their legacy has filtered down the centuries to today.

It seems Paul Torday can do no wrong. The Girl On The Landing (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99) is his third book and destined to do as well as the other two. This psychological thriller tells the story of dull, dependable Michael who begins to question his grip on reality after a series of unexplained incidents. As events and the past conspire to destroy everything and everyone Michael has ever cherished, his wife finds in her changing husband a man with whom she could really fall in love.

Who is Mr Toppit, the shadowy figure who dominates a series of obscure children’s books called The Hayseed Chronicles? And what is the signifance of the book’s enigmatic last line? Just as the stories achieve world-wide success the author Arthur Hayman is run over by a truck. The legacy passes to his family but others want their share and it soon becomes clear that hidden deep inside the books lie secrets would be better left alone. Mr Toppit by Charles Elton (Viking, £12.99) is funny, painful and riveting.

Another edge-of-your-seat author is Sophie Hannah. In The Other Half Lives (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99) Ruth knows what it means to be wrong and be wronged. So when she falls in love with Aidan, a passionate young man damaged by his past, she doesn’t believe she deserves his love. Trying to exorcise his own demons, Aidan confesses he once killed a woman called Mary Trelease. Sickened and frightened Ruth realises she knows the name and why it’s familiar – and that the Mary Trelease she knows is very much alive.

MARCH

Clothes matter to Linda Grant. They are a recurring theme in her novels and her blog on the subject has developed into a small devoted community. In The Thoughtful Dresser (Virago, £11.99) she explores clothes and fashion arguing that they matter to all of us and we shouldn’t feel ashamed or trivialise our interest. Clothing is common to humanity, caring about what we wear or not is a sign of our mental well-being, it reveals our characters, our desire to fit in and can even save lives. How we look and what we wear tells a story and, she maintains, are as revelant as the other topics that concern us.

Using paintings as his starting point Jeremy Paxman takes us on a personal journey through Victorian England. He explores family, industry, empire and urban life exploding myths about the period and arguing that paintings were the television of the day. Published to coincide with a new TV series, The Victorians (BBC Books, £20) is an enthusiastic appraisal of a generation that made us what we are today.

What To Do When Someone Dies by Nicci French (Michael Joseph, £12.99). It’s devastating enough for Ellie when her husband Greg is killed in a car crash. Then she discovers that there was another woman in the car. Tormented by the idea that he was having an affair and distraught with grief, she is determined to prove his innocence. But the deeper Ellie digs, the more others question her sanity and motives. When all the evidence starts to point to murder, suspicion begins to fall on Ellie herself. Would it be safer just to keep quiet?

A Matter Of Loyalty (Simon & Schuster, £12.99) the third novel from Sandra Howard, wife of the former Conservative leader, goes behind the scenes of the Home Office after a bomb explodes in London’s West End.

A young Muslim reporter persuades his paper to let him return home to Leeds to see what he can uncover. When he meets the Home Secretary’s daughter at a party he can’t get her out of his mind. They begin seeing each other but when he discovers links to potential terrorists, he realises that they and the nation are all in terrible danger.