Andrew Rosenheim

The old adage that everyone has a novel in them has a new version: anyone can write a thriller. Celebrity helps, of course, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are exemplars of the trend, though each has had the sense to draw on professional assistance and the grace to acknowledge it. Closer to home, Britain has spawned its own unexpected authors, led by Richard Osman with his astonishing successful The Thursday Murder Club. Now Alan Johnson, the former Labour MP and cabinet minister, joins the club with The Late Train to Gipsy Hill (Headline, £16.99), his first foray into fiction. He arrives with impressive credentials, however, having published three excellent volumes of memoirs since leaving politics. Like them, this book is well written, if less affecting.

Literary estates work to preserve a writer’s reputation — and sometimes milk it too. The appearance of this novel by John le Carré less than a year after his death seems almost suspiciously opportune, but whatever the publishing expediency involved, it is a very fine finale. Julian Lawndsley is the 33-year-old owner of a bookshop in an East Anglian seaside town, having fled the City, where he has made both his fortune and his name asa canny trader. Any echoes of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald soon fade as we discover that Lawndsley knows virtually nothing about books and even less about the customers he sells them to — until Edward Avon, an exotic foreigner, enters his shop one evening.

Social historians of the future may look back at the reading habits of this era and conclude that we were almost exclusively interested in Nazis and Nordics. Certainly there seems no diminution in these twin tastes. Widowland (Quercus, £14.99) by C.J. Carey (a pseudonym for the writer Jane Thynne) is the latest Nazi-related novel in a crowded field, and its author wisely opts for a different, if not altogether original, conceit. An alternate Britain which lost the war has featured in fiction before — notably in Robert Harris’s Fatherland and Len Deighton’s SS-GB — but even with such celebrated predecessors, Carey more than holds her own.

Almost any promising writer of spy fiction can expect at some point to be called the ‘next Le Carré’, an accolade even more promiscuously applied since the death of the master. James Wolff has immediate credentials to jump the queue, since, like Le Carré, he uses a pseudonym and claims to work at the Foreign Office — though his familiarity with surveillance techniques suggests a slightly different employer. How to Betray Your Country (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99) arrives as the second in a planned trilogy, hard on the heels of Wolff’s striking debut, Beside the Syrian Sea. August Drummond is a former British intelligence officer, cashiered for insubordination after the sudden death of his tricky but entirely beloved wife.

Since Robert Lowell’s sudden death in 1977 his critical reputation has suffered from the usual post-mortem slump. Interest in Lowell’s life, however, remains as strong as during his celebrity heyday, when he graced the cover of Time magazine and marched on the Pentagon with Norman Mailer. A biography (excellent, by Ian Hamilton), an edition of his letters, and a volume of the correspondence between Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop are all firmly in print. Now we have The Dolphin Letters: 1970–1979, which includes both Lowell’s letters to his wife Elizabeth Hardwick (during and after the dissolution of their marriage) and her letters to him, long thought to have been lost or destroyed.