MUST READS  | Daily Mail Online

STILL WATER

by John Lewis-Stempel (Black Swan £9.99, 304 pp)

‘Their humility [is] their own enemy,’ writes John Lewis-Stempel of that modest water feature, the pond. Yet for the very young, they are places of fascination and adventure, where frogspawn, tadpoles and minnows can be caught in jam jars, while dragonflies flash overhead and water-boatmen mysteriously skim the surface.

Here, the award-winning nature writer explores the life of ponds throughout the seasons, beginning in winter when teal, mallard and snipe flock to his farm.

In spring, he finds toads ‘mating with characteristic lack of discrimination’.

Summer brings fairy-like mayflies, who will live, mate and die in the space of a few hours. In autumn, Lewis-Stempel watches bats skimming the water’s surface in search of insects.

Mixing natural history with memoir, this is a lyrical tribute to the beauty of still waters.

THE CHAIN

by Adrian McKinty (Orion £8.99, 416 pp)

When a novel begins with two epigraphs, one from Schopenhauer, the other from Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, you know you’re in for a wild ride — and so it proves in this bestselling thriller.

The first sentence is a heart-stopper: ‘She’s sitting at the bus stop checking the likes on her Instagram feed and doesn’t even notice the man with the gun until he’s almost next to her.’

For the next 400-odd pages, the pace doesn’t slacken: McKinty combines the Mexican concept of exchange kidnappings, in which a family member offers to take the place of a more vulnerable victim, with the sinister tradition of chain letters, which frightened him as a child in Ireland.

The result is a gripping, swift-paced novel that asks disturbing questions about how far parents will go to protect their children.

SPRING

by Ali Smith (Penguin £8.99, 352 pp)

Spring is the third book in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet exploring contemporary concerns.

New life stirs in springtime, but the stirrings with which Smith’s novel opens are more ominous than hopeful: a troll-like monologue on the current state of political discourse, followed by the voice of the earth itself, reminding humanity how puny we are.

The protagonist, Richard Lease, is a man in crisis. Estranged from his daughter, he’s mourning the death of his friend and mentor, Paddy. Hollowed-out by grief, he gets on a train, ending up somewhere in northern Scotland.

Here his story crosses that of Brittany Hall, who works in an Immigration Removal Centre. With references from Charlie Chaplin to Shakespeare, Smith’s novel explores the haunting possibility of hope and renewal in dark times.