Piedmont

Authors hate it when reviewers refer to their book as a ‘weighty tome’ as it implies that the contents are going to be about as much fun as Deuteronomy. So I should make it clear that while Tim Hayward’s The Cocktail Hour (Quadrille, £20) is extremely weighty, that’s because the production values are off the scale. The monks at Lindisfarne could scarcely have put more effort into illuminating their work. And while the paper is heavy, Hayward’s writing is as refreshing as a perfectly made dry martini. There are hundreds of cocktail books out there, but none combine Hayward’s erudition, obsession and sense of humour. He is at once deadly serious and very, very funny. It’s the best book on the subject since Bernard DeVoto’s 1948 book The Hour.

In 1984 Innocenzo Monti died after a short illness. He and the writer Lalla Romano had been married since 1932 and had met in the late 1920s in her native Piedmont. Romano – a poet, painter and the author of 19 novels – wrote the story of their life together in her 1987 book Nei mari estremi, rendered as In Farthest Seas by the translator Brian Robert Moore. The structure of the book – an auto-fictional memoir – is bifurcated. The opening, shorter, part deals with the first four years of the relationship, from the moment of their first encounter (he was ‘wearing hiking boots, we were in the mountains’), to their early sexual explorations. ‘Discomfort, effort, labour’ is luckily replaced by ‘bliss’ that was ‘beautiful, even a little exalting’.