This list is compiled from extracts of recent Book of the Week selections published in The Week magazine. Click here to view our subscription options, and every week you'll discover what the press wrote about the very best in new fiction and non-fiction.
The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre
Viking 384pp £25
The Week Bookshop £19.99
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Oleg Gordievsky, the subject of this “wonderful” book, was the “most significant British agent of the Cold War”, said Luke Harding in The Guardian. For 11 years, between 1974 and 1985, he passed Russian secrets to MI6 while working for the KGB, first in Copenhagen and later in London. Even more remarkably, he became the only British agent ever to be exfiltrated out of Russia, after his KGB bosses had grown suspicious and recalled him to Moscow. Gordievsky’s story has been told before, not least in his own “gripping” 1995 memoir, Next Stop Execution. Yet Ben Macintrye’s book “complements and enhances” that account. Based on interviews not only with its subject (who is now 79 and lives in the Home Counties, still “under sentence of death”), but with every MI6 officer involved in the case, this is a “dazzling non-fiction thriller”.
Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings
William Collins 752pp £30
The Week Bookshop £23.99 (incl. p&p)
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“Few wars have been as poisonous as Vietnam,” said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. It lasted three decades, cost between two and three million lives, and ended in humiliation both for France (which fought between 1946 and 1954) and America (in the ground war between 1965 and 1975). For the Vietnamese, meanwhile, it was an “environmental and human disaster”. As a young BBC journalist, Max Hastings reported from the battlefield; he was in Saigon in April 1975, during America’s “desperate” withdrawal. In Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, he has produced a “masterful” history that deftly analyses the “high politics” while memorably charting the war on the ground. With a “peerless eye” for detail, Hastings captures it all: the “North Vietnamese civilian diet of stewed rat and silkworm larvae”; the widespread use of drugs among “bored” American troops; even the fact that many GIs foreswore underpants, because the humidity bred “crotch fungus”.
The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman
W&N 306pp £16.99
The Week Bookshop £13.99
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In March 1948, 11-year-old Sally Horner stole a notebook from Woolworths in Camden, New Jersey, said P.D. Smith in The Guardian. She had only done it for a dare, but this minor misdemeanour would change her life for ever. As she was leaving, a man grabbed her and told her he was from the FBI. He’d seen her stealing, he said, but would let her go if she agreed to report to him occasionally. A few months later, the man – in reality a serial rapist named Frank La Salle – reappeared, and abducted Sally. For 21 months, he travelled with her across the US, pretending she was his daughter. Her ordeal ended only when she managed to escape and phone her sister. He spent the rest of his life in jail; she was killed in a car crash two years later.
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
Allen Lane 224pp £20
The Week Bookshop £15.99
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Michael Lewis “prides himself on being able to make anything exciting”, said Josh Glancy in The Sunday Times. The acclaimed non-fiction writer has previously tackled the bond market (Liar’s Poker), baseball stats (Moneyball) and behavioural economics (The Undoing Project). In his latest book, he applies himself to what might seem like “the most turgid subject of them all – bureaucracy”. Although in part about Donald Trump’s presidency, The Fifth Risk is also an extended “civics lesson” in which Lewis immerses himself in the “gills and guts” of the US government. He has interviewed scores of civil servants and established “what it is that giant, nebulous departments such as commerce, energy or agriculture actually do”. His alarming conclusion is that thanks to the complacency and disorganisation of Trump’s administration, whole swathes of the government are ceasing to function.
Slowhand by Philip Norman
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 448pp £25
The Week Bookshop £19.99
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In 1967, a graffiti artist daubed “Clapton is God” on walls across London, said Will Hodgkinson in The Times. For many of us growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it was hard to equate this “deified blues guitarist of legend” with the reality of whom Eric Clapton appeared to be: a dull “corporate rocker” in “oversized Armani suits” who had once drunkenly proclaimed his support for Enoch Powell. One of the virtues of Philip Norman’s “perceptive” biography is to show that neither of these images – the rock god nor the “amoeba with a guitar” – is correct. Instead, Clapton, who wrote such classics as Layla and Sunshine of Your Love, emerges as “a complex, troubled man” whose drive to be a great guitarist stemmed from “deep-rooted insecurity”.
This list is compiled from extracts of recent Book of the Week selections published in The Week magazine. Click here to view our subscription options, and every week you'll discover what the press wrote about the very best in new fiction and non-fiction.