MUST READS  – Jan 02, 2020

THE WISDOM OF WOLVES

by Elli H Radinger (Michael Joseph £9.99)

As a lawyer working in Frankfurt, Elli Radinger was beginning to feel burned out: making a bold decision to pursue her love of nature and writing full-time, she applied for an internship at a wolf research institute in Indiana.

The final interview was not with a human, but with Imbo, a six-year-old timber wolf. He sprang towards her, and licked her face.

With that first wolf ‘kiss’, her life with wolves began. As she observed the wolf pack, Elli realised that their social behaviour is very similar to that of human beings. 

In terms of family dynamics, leadership, love, loss and playfulness, ‘the wolf is a great teacher from whom we can learn a lot about life.’

Elli’s bestselling book suggests that in a high-tech age, when so many of us have become alienated from nature, wolves have much to teach us about the art of living well.

SEVEN SIGNS OF LIFE

by Aoife Abbey (Vintage £8.99)

As a little girl, Aoife Abbey knew that to be a doctor was her dream job. ‘But now,’ she writes, ‘I am not sure what a dream job is supposed to look like.’

Aoife currently works as an intensive care specialist, and used to write the widely read blog, The Secret Doctor, for the British Medical Association.

Her memoir is a moving and often raw account of working with patients, from the most fragile to people who are angry, difficult, and occasionally criminals.

A doctor’s work, she suggests, involves not just being in command of technology, but ‘being able to work with being human’.

Each chapter discusses a different emotion. Some are uplifting — joy, hope — but many reflect the hardest aspects of treating patients — fear, anger and grief. This courageous memoir offers a sensitive insight into the minds of the physicians who care for us at our most vulnerable.

THINGS IN JARS

by Jess Kidd (Canongate £8.99)

The year is 1863 and strange things are afoot: Mrs Bridie Devine is a brilliant, though unofficial, female detective who helps out Scotland Yard with cases that have puzzled them. And her current case is certainly a puzzle.

The corpse of a young woman has been found by workmen in the crypt of Highgate chapel. She is richly dressed, has been brutally beaten and in her arms is a wizened baby, a few months old.

But there is something strange about the infant: its little mouth is packed with needle-sharp teeth.

Kidd’s third novel is a Gothic chiller which offers a fantastical journey through the murkier crevices of Victorian London, a mysterious realm peopled with wicked physicians, gruesome medical curiosities and knowing ravens, where the amorous phantom of a deceased boxer, Ruby Doyle, offers Bridie ghostly companionship in her dogged pursuit of the truth.