BE NEAR ME by Andrew O’Hagan

Father David Anderton, a Catholic priest more comfortable with the pleasures of art and wine than the messy emotions of other people, arrives in a working-class Scottish parish. Lonely and haunted by memories of lost love and lost ideals, he falls into a dangerously ambivalent friendship with a teenage boy that inevitably leads him towards catastrophe. In many ways this is a remarkable novel, but the beauty and the balance of O’Hagan’s prose, his originality and fastidious aversion to cliché and commonplace thinking never quite blunt the feeling that the relationships he describes, particularly the central one between the boy and the priest, are contrived and unconvincing and could never exist outside the pages of fiction.

(Faber £7.99). NR

THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science by Jonathan Haidt

Haidt uses a scientific approach to sift through some contemporary and ancient “wisdoms” and answer some of life’s big questions: “What should I do, how should I live, and whom should I become?” He takes a number of the principal ideas promulgated by teachers and philosophers over the centuries (from Buddha to Nietzsche) and puts them to the test of modern scientific research in order to demonstrate how human beings can find happiness and why some people find meaning and fulfilment in life and others do not. This unusual book sets itself apart from the self-help category with its extensive scientific references, and intelligent, neutral prose, while the author’s illuminating illustration of how the human mind works is both educational and refreshing.

(Arrow £7.99). JW

EATING MYSELF by Candida Crewe

Crewe, though a successful and healthy woman, nevertheless thinks either about food or her weight every “few seconds”. Her confessions are brave and her writing is often warm and witty, but she is sadly thwarted by the tedium of her subject matter; there are three consecutive pages, for instance, about Diet Coke. At one point in this anxious memoir, Crewe remembers being told she “looked ‘like a feminist’”. Her credentials are not so evident when she declares that her friend Sophie who drinks “real” Coke “doesn’t count” because she has “a rather masculine way about her”. This book will provoke any feminist (or, in fact, many women) to dive into the fridge to prove herself an exception to Crewe’s belief that no female has a normal relationship with food.

(Bloomsbury £7.99). ES-B

PARALLEL LINES: A Journey from Childhood to Belsen by Peter Lantos

The Nazis’ Final Solution came late to Hungary, but when the Germans did finally invade, in March 1944, they carried out their genocidal programme with startling speed. Lantos, then just four years old, was shunted within months from ghetto to work camp to Bergen- Belsen, which, when liberated by the British in April 1945, was full of disease and suffering. Being so young at the time, Lantos has had to fill in many details through research, and his account of his archival adventures detracts somewhat from his astonishing narrative. His book is, nonetheless, a remarkable addition to the literature of the Holocaust.

(Arcadia £8.99). IC

BECKETT REMEMBERING REMEMBERING BECKETT by James Knowlson

Samuel Beckett was so scrupulously private (“I have no views to inter,” he riposted when his friend Raymond Federman requested an interview) that even the lean scraps of his childhood recollections yield rich pickings. The testimonies of those who knew or admired him range from sharp insights to reverent nothings. Knowlson’s access is broad, and some of the grouped selections are superb. Best are those from the actors and technicians who recall him severely at work, and his students at Trinity, who remember an intense young “long thin streak of misery”, who once absent-mindedly set himself on fire.

(Bloomsbury £8.99). CM

THE DAMNED UTD by David Peace

This absorbing novel re-creates the voice of Brian Clough, one of England’s most charismatic football managers, who specialised in turning small teams into spectacular overachievers. However, when he took over Leeds United in 1974 (a large club with an established group of stars), he was sacked after 44 days. Peace switches between a first-person narrative covering each troubled day at Leeds, and the story of Clough’s career before he took charge, weaving the terrible lows (the Sunday hangover after a defeat) with the brilliant highs (Derby winning the title). What emerges is a convincing portrait of a man motivated by setbacks and slights, who never felt happy winning, just a surge of vengeful pleasure.

(Faber £7.99). SR

THE SALE OF THE LATE KING’S GOODS by Jerry Brotton

On January 30, 1649, Charles I stepped onto a scaffold in London’s Whitehall to meet his executioner. Six months later, the newly republican parliament passed a bill declaring that the goods of the royal family were “justly forfeited by them for their several Delinquencies” and should be sold. Focusing on that pivotal moment, Brotton has written a masterly account of the creation of Charles I’s art collection, its dispersal (in the 1650s, masterpieces by Titian and Van Dyck could be found in the suburban homes of traders to whom the king had owed money) and its reassembly after the Restoration. His detailed narrative revealingly maps the territory where art and political power met and interacted.

(Pan £8.99). NR

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