WAXING MYTHICAL: The Life and Legend of Madame Tussaud by Kate Berridge

Born in 1761 to an 18-year-old cook, Madame Tussaud was an unlikely candidate for worldwide renown. She grew up in Paris during the French revolution under the tutelage of Curtius, her guardian and mentor, from whom she learnt the art of wax sculpture. After his death she continued his work in England where, after arduous years as a struggling showperson, she established herself as an international figure. There is little documentation of Tussaud’s personal life, and her autobiographical accounts are rife with exaggeration. Nevertheless, Berridge draws us in with atmospheric historical detail and paints a picture of a woman with an independent spirit unusual for her time.

(J Murray £9.99). JW

THE DELIVERY ROOM by Sylvia Brownrigg

No actual childbirth occurs in the eponymous room, it being an affectionate name given to Serbian therapist Mira Braverman’s consultancy suite, but the shrink supplies plenty of pregnant silences to complement the emotional contractions that force out her patients’ secrets. And babies (prematurely lost or achingly desired) do loom large in the minds of several clients, to whom she assigns monikers: the Mourning Madonna, the Aristocrat. The characters are shaded with a thoroughness and thoughtfulness that extends to attendant themes, such as mortality and political conflict. A book of ambitious reach and assured grasp.

(Picador £7.99). TL

LOVE OVER SCOTLAND by Alexander McCall Smith

McCall Smith leaves Botswana and the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency for Edinburgh and his amiable series featuring the inhabitants of 44 Scotland Street. Told in brief episodes, this is a book where not very much happens: Irene, pushy mother of Bertie, the six-year-old master of the saxophone, gets him accepted for a teenage orchestra; Cyril, the dog belonging to Angus the painter, is kidnapped; Pat moves in with Matthew, but will love blossom? In the hands of a master storyteller, though, the result is as warm and enjoyable as a very good soap opera.

(Abacus £6.99). SB

LAST CURTSEY: The End of the Debutantes by Fiona MacCarthy

When she was a Guardian journalist in the 1960s, “the Season” was MacCarthy’s “unmentionably embarrassing secret history”. With the rise of instant celebrity and arguably the fall of feminism, debutantes are now icons of an age when it took birth, breeding and an audience with the Queen to make it into the press. MacCarthy “came out” in 1958, the last season, and she charts the social changes that led to the deb’s demise. Princess Margaret voiced anxieties about the ritual being debased when she said “every tart in London” was getting in, while a loathing for snobbery made the tradition untenable. Last Curtsey strikes a fine balance between romance and anathema: the glamour of cocktail parties is offset by the display of women available for marriage.

(Faber £8.99). ES-B

A DEATH IN BELMONT by Sebastian Junger

Junger owns a photograph of himself as a child in his mother’s arms. Also in the photo is a carpenter who was working at their house in the quiet Boston suburb of Belmont in 1963. His name was Albert DeSalvo, later revealed as the Boston Strangler. Days before the photo was taken, a neighbour was raped and strangled. A black handyman named Roy Smith was convicted, despite protestations of innocence. Asking difficult questions of innocence and guilt but finding no easy answers, Junger revisits the story of Smith, DeSalvo and the Belmont murder in a compelling work of reportage.

(HarperPerennial £7.99). NR

THE WOMAN IN THE PICTURE by James Wilson

In 1927, Henry Whitaker travels to Germany and tracks down the fiancée of the soldier who killed his father at Ypres. Her fiancé now dead, she has fallen into prostitution, and Henry is faced with the macabre but strangely alluring prospect of losing his virginity to the fiancée of his father’s killer. He is mesmerised by the cinematic possibilities of the encounter. The dark opening scene gives way to a quieter novel that traces Henry’s film-making career in the 1930s and 1940s. The narrative alternates between his perspective and that of his daughter, Miranda, in the present day. Wilson deftly combines romance and historical novel with mystery — though that of Miranda’s mother is not entirely clarified.

(Faber £7.99). ES-B

THE TOMB OF AGAMEMNON by Cathy Gere

In 1876, the maverick archeologist Heinrich Schliemann dug into the mountainside at Mycenae in central Greece and unearthed some remarkable artefacts, including a haunting mask of beaten gold. Schliemann decided he had found a Homeric hero. “Today, I gazed upon the face of Agamemnon,” he is alleged to have said. He was wrong. The mask predates the Trojan war by many centuries. Yet, as Cathy Gere’s short, entertaining book shows, Schliemann’s “tomb of Agamemnon” did propel Mycenaean civilization into the limelight. From Freudians delving into the history of the unconscious to Nazis seeking Aryan ancestors, 20th-century cultural analysts of all kinds could find something in it to intrigue them. Gere wittily chronicles the varying interpretations that Schliemann’s discovery has inspired.

(Profile £8.99). NR

THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX by Maggie O’Farrell

Esme Lennox has spent 61 years in Cauldstone psychiatric unit, surrounded by women making tea for long-dead husbands and nurses who ignore every word she says. When Cauldstone closes down, they telephone Iris, Esme’s only known relative. Iris has family entanglements of her own: she grapples with a buried love for her stepbrother. As she is forced to take responsibility for the great-aunt she never knew she had, Iris becomes fascinated by her family’s erasure of a life. Esme’s poignant memories gradually disclose her childhood in India, where her baby brother died of typhoid, and her teenage years in Edinburgh. Esme’s grief for her brother was considered excessive, her antisocial behaviour at dances seemed like dangerous rebellion. O’Farrell gently shows how oppressive social norms allowed a free-thinking woman to be institutionalise.

(Headline £7.99). ES-B

A LOAD OF BULL by Tim Parfitt

In the late 1980s, Parfitt was sent to Madrid to help launch the Spanish edition of Vogue. The secondment from London was supposed to last six weeks. He stayed for 10 years. This book about his adventures, most involving prodigious quantities of alcohol, failed attempts to bed alluring señoritas and allegedly comic misunderstandings of the country and its language, is yet another in the endless series of memoirs in which fumbling Englishmen are baffled by foreignness. When Parfitt turns his attention to his discovery of the real Spain behind the clichés, his writing comes to life, but too often he’s playing variations on a flat, tired them.

(Pan £7.99). NR

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