Smash hit

GOOD CLEAN FUN
BY MICHAEL ARDITTI
Maia, £8.99
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Michael Arditti is an accomplished novelist, but his first collection of short stories comprises as many misses as hits. Most notable of the former is the title story, a stand-up comedian’s monologue that becomes a private confession which, despite the clever conceit, feels forced in its execution. Elsewhere Arditti imbues his stories of loneliness, confusion and the uncertainties of sexual neophytes with genuine pathos and an appealing line in dry humour.

Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson

KRAKATOA
BY SIMON WINCHESTER
Penguin, £7.99
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The Earth moved for the entire population of the planet on August 27, 1883, when the island of Krakatoa, off Java, was destroyed in a volcanic eruption. About 40,000 people died in the cataclysm. The global repercussions were dramatic in the political short term and the geological and social long term. No apocalyptic movie or TV documentary relishing the moment of global disaster can cover the ground of Winchester’s analysis.

If the beating of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon rainforest can affect the weather halfway across the globe, it is almost unimaginable what the wound inflicted by Krakatoa did to the ecosphere. Lurid sunsets over London were the least of it. Krakatoa is a buzz word for disaster-watchers and an eponym for the fragility of natural ecological and political balances. Krakatoa was a millennial event that galvanised the new industrialised world, that kick-started the sciences and technologies that we depend on today. This fine book starts with a big bang and is energetically compelled to its alarming conclusions by that initial impetus.

A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING
BY BILL BRYSON
Black Swan, £8.99
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According to the arresting introduction, you and I are made of trillions of atoms that don’t care about us, don’t know we are there and don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles. Such, says Bryson mischievously, is the mystery of life. From this reductio ad absurdum, he goes on to get smart answers to dumb questions that amount to nearly everything you wanted to know about life on Earth and, sometimes, beyond.

THE SEVEN ORDEALS OF COUNT CAGLIOSTRO
BY IAIN McCALMAN
Arrow, £7.99
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Through involvement in The Affair of the Queen’s Necklace, Count Cagliostro (in fact, from the back alleys of Palermo) is credited with precipitating the French Revolution. As a soi-disant magician, he is said to have been influential in the Masons, Illuminati, Templars and other 18th-century secret circles. Cagliostro owes much of his fame to artists who have imagined him: Victor Hugo, Mozart, Thomas Carlyle. This exciting book seeks the reality behind the legend.

ROBERT BYRON
BY JAMES KNOX
John Murray, £10.99
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A fat, fastidious, aesthetically minded, upper-class, discreetly homosexual, dilettante Englishman abroad, Byron was the last of the prewar mandarin breed. In Europe, and the Far and Near East, he kept travel diaries that became remarkable travel books which inspired Patrick Leigh Fermor and Bruce Chatwin. It is difficult to write a biography of such a precious person without becoming mannered oneself, but Knox manages without becoming the period cliché that is his subject.

MARTHA GELLHORN: A LIFE
BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD
Vintage, £8.99
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Everyone has a terrible friend who is a charming rogue or a charismatic diva and to whose iron whim all must bend. Gellhorn, in her last years, was a shrine at which a few devoted intimates were permitted to pay respectful tribute. Moorehead’s not uncritical biography tailgates her fast-forward life from childhood in St Louis to the war zones of the 20th century as a reporter. Her marriage to Ernest Hemingway was another domestic war. This “Life” is a bravura performance.

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