MUST READS
A THOUSAND SHIPS by Natalie Haynes (Picador £8.99, 368 pp)
A THOUSAND SHIPS
by Natalie Haynes (Picador £8.99, 368 pp)
In her Radio 4 series, Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics, she brought the classics to sparkling life. In her new novel, Haynes offers a fresh perspective on the story of the Trojan war.
Homer’s epic poem, The Iliad, tells of war and warriors, yet it is also a story full of women — from the Trojan women, captured and abused as spoils of war; to Penelope, wife of the Greek hero Odysseus, patiently awaiting her husband’s long-delayed return; and Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.
Haynes brings these marginal figures to the foreground, giving them voices to tell their stories with resilience and wit. ‘A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches,’ Calliope concludes, ‘so why do we?’
TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIMES by James Meek (Canongate £9.99, 400 pp)
TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIMES
by James Meek (Canongate £9.99, 400 pp)
It is high summer in 1348 in the fictional village of Outen Green in Gloucestershire. English archers have captured Calais at the Battle of Crecy.
The plague has claimed its first victim in a pandemic that will wipe out some 40 per cent of Europe’s population. However, the narrators of this captivating novel have more pressing concerns. Lady Bernadine is in love with a dashing soldier, but her father has betrothed her to his ghastly old chum, Sir Hennery.
Will Quate, a fine bowman, has been selected to join the defence of Calais, while Thomas Pitkerro, a cleric on secondment from Avignon, longs to return to France.
Their three very different voices recount a hazardous pilgrimage whose far-distant events have plangent echoes of our own times.
A HALF BAKED IDEA by Olivia Potts (Penguin £8.99, 368 pp)
A HALF BAKED IDEA
by Olivia Potts (Penguin £8.99, 368 pp)
As a barrister, Olivia Potts didn’t usually cook, surviving on a diet of sandwiches and takeaway kebabs.
But then she met Sam, who was keen on cooking, and whom she was eager to impress.
As she was baking a cake for their first dinner party, she chatted to her beloved mother on the phone.
A few hours later her mother was dead.
Blindsided by grief, Olivia found that bereavement brought with it a kind of recklessness.
She gave up her promising legal career to study patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu cookery school.
Poised between sadness and delight, and punctuated with delicious recipes, this tender memoir explores grief, new love and the life-affirming magic that transforms patisserie into soul food.