MUST READS  | Daily Mail Online

OLIVE, AGAIN

by Elizabeth Strout (Penguin £8.99, 304 pp)

A cantankerous maths teacher with a colourful line in bracing put-downs might seem an unlikely heroine, but when Olive Kitteridge first appeared in Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, she charmed her way into readers’ hearts.

Now Olive returns in Strout’s new novel. Two years have passed since the death of her long-suffering husband, Henry, but she still lives in the small New England town of Crosby, where the opening stories find Olive and her on-off friend, Jack Kennison, in a tangle of misunderstanding and hurt feelings.

Gradually, they find their way towards the realisations that will become the book’s leitmotif: that amid all the disappointments of life, a few, very simple things console us: kindness, friendship, and a bud opening on a newly planted rosebush.

CROSSROADS

by Mark Radcliffe (Canongate £9.99, 304 pp)

For the award-winning music broadcaster Mark Radcliffe, turning 60 in 2018 was a milestone surrounded by sadness.

He lost his father and was diagnosed with cancer (now in remission).

But there were happier highlights, including a road trip to the U.S. with old friends. There, Radcliffe found himself standing by a crossroads in the town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, where the itinerant musician Robert Johnson is supposed to have made a Faustian pact with a devilish figure, who transformed him into one of the greatest bluesmen of all time.

The coincidence of standing there in his own crossroads year gave Radcliffe the idea for a book about musical turning-points. The result is funny, brilliantly entertaining and packed with musical lore.

ATTLEE AND CHURCHILL

by Leo McKinstry (Atlantic £10.99, 752 pp)

It is hard to imagine two more contrasting characters than Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee.

Not only were they leaders of opposing political parties, but their temperaments were dramatically different.

As Leo McKinstry puts it, ‘While Churchill embodied the spirit of the buccaneer eager for some new daring task, Attlee was like a headmaster bent on the strict enforcement of the rules.’

Yet when Attlee served as Churchill’s deputy prime minister in the wartime coalition government, a respect grew between the two men that endured until the very end.

At Churchill’s own request, Attlee — in his 80s and very frail — served as a pallbearer at Churchill’s state funeral. McKinstry’s masterly biography gives a vivid portrait of the two great men and their remarkable relationship, which he describes as ‘unprecedented in the annals of British politics’.