MUST READS  – Jan 16, 2020

NIGHTINGALE POINT

by Luan Goldie (HQ £8.99, 384 pp)

On a stifling summer’s day the residents of Nightingale Point, a London tower block, are going about their lives.

Mary, a nurse, is feeling uneasy — a sensation perhaps connected with the arrival of her estranged husband from the Philippines; broken-hearted student Malachi is keeping an eye on his wayward younger brother, Tristan; Pamela, Malachi’s ex-girlfriend, is deciding how to tell him some important news, and Elvis, who has just moved from assisted living into his own flat, is being bullied. Suddenly, everything changes.

The catastrophe at the heart of Luan Goldie’s first novel resembles the Grenfell Tower tragedy, but the story is based on an incident in 1992, when a plane crashed into two high-rise blocks in Amsterdam.

Costa prize-winning author Goldie compassionately explores the ways her characters’ lives are changed, and how they live with the aftermath.

THE TRUTH ABOUT FAT

by Anthony Warner (Oneworld £9.99, 384 pp)

Anthony Warner’s book is a call for a new approach to a fast-growing problem: obesity.

‘We need to accept that there is no single cure, because there was never a single cause,’ he argues. In 2017, the UK became the fattest country in Western Europe. At the same time the diet industry has grown, as new fads emerge with bewildering frequency.

Warner, a former chef at one of the UK’s largest food manufacturers who blogs as The Angry Chef, is scathing about the blame culture and our unhealthy and ineffectual obsession with ‘clean eating’.

‘It is not the food that is significant, but the way we use it,’ he insists, suggesting that before we change our diet, we need to change our minds.

THE FIVE

by Hallie Rubenhold (Black Swan £9.99, 432 pp)

In the late summer and autumn of 1888, five women were murdered in Whitechapel, East London.

The murderer was never found, and speculation about the identity of Jack the Ripper has continued ever since.

Hundreds of books have been published about the murders; yet none, until now, has sought to discover who the women were before becoming victims.

Hallie Rubenhold’s prizewinning work of historical detection tells the stories of Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.

Piecing together evidence from social histories of the era, as well as coroner’s inquests, parish and court records and workhouse archives, she asks how these daughters, wives, mothers, sisters and lovers came to meet their lonely, violent deaths.

In doing so, she gives them, at last, a voice.