Ysenda Maxtone Graham

I like a book where you don’t think you’re going to be interested in the subject, but then find it’s so vigorously and engagingly written that you’re enchanted. This is one of those. I’m not a skier —I’m quickly bored when coffee-drinking mothers start recounting their children’s latest achievements on the piste — so I expected to have had enough by page five, as I set off across the blinding whiteness of this ‘biography’ of snow, written by a man who’s wearing ski-goggles in the jacket photo. But in Giles Whittell’s genial company, reading it was a great pleasure.

Lissa Evans has had a good idea for her new novel. It’s ‘suffragettes: the sequel’. She sets her story not in 1918 but in 1928. Two washed-up spinster suffragettes in their sixties, Florrie (known as ‘the Flea’) and Mattie, live together platonically in a house in Hampstead known as the Mousehole, because it used to be a convalescent home for hunger-striking suffragettes during the Cat and Mouse Act. It’s freezing, and they cut up old Christmas cards for splints, conversing like two dotty old dons. ‘What utter spinach!’ ‘Small sherry? Or a toddy? Buck you up a bit.’ Their WSPU glory days are behind them. Florrie is now a sanitary inspector, and Mattie gives lectures with slides about her window-smashing past.

My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I asked him how he was getting on. He said: ‘I’ve just got to the knifing.’ I said: ‘What knifing?’ I’d already forgotten about the knifing. A whole knifing in south London, complete with innocent dead boy and devastated mother. The incident’s strange forgettableness was a sign of the flaws of a novel so nearly very good, and admirable in many ways. It’s sprawling (like the suburbs of south London in which it’s set), and many of its extended scenes, though beautifully and richly imagined, lack the vital element of plot-forwarding relevance that would make them memorable.

After three hot-water-bottle-warmed evenings of highly satisfying bedtime reading, I can confirm that, even in a world where Francis Spufford’s superb The Child that Books Built exists, we need this new memoir by Lucy Mangan, about her childhood of being a bookworm. It’s enchanting.

It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in the imagination. It’s that of Eva Rausing’s decomposed body, wrapped in a tarpaulin on the marital double bed in Belgravia, buried under a mattress, several flat-screen televisions and a heap of blankets and duvets. When it was discovered by police forcing open the duct-taped bedroom door in July 2012 — more than two months after her husband Hans had left it there, unable to face up to his wife’s death from cocaine-induced heart failure — the only way Eva could be identified was by a fingerprint and the number on her pacemaker.

It’s not often that books make me laugh aloud. Even books I’m officially finding funny often do no more than make me smile, or emit a sharp soundless puff of breath from the nostrils. But this book made me guffaw. Normally, only P. G. Wodehouse has that effect. It’s tragicomedy, really.

I like novelists who don’t try to do everything in their novels, but just to do something well. This is what Francesca Segal achieves in The Awkward Age, published four years after her book, The Innocents, won the Costa First Novel Award. She takes six characters — widowed, middle-aged Julia, her teenage daughter Gwen, her grandparents-in-law Philip and Iris, her new American boyfriend James, and James’s teenage son Nathan — and plonks them in sturdy houses in Hampstead, sets the clock, and lets the story play out. Gwen and Nathan are now forced to share a dwelling. Like a good piece of Bach, what unfolds has an inevitability to it but manages also to be surprising at every moment.

This is a gem of a book for Radio 4 lovers, particularly those of us who work out which day of the week it is by who’s speaking on the station at 9.02 a.m. Published the week that Midweek was abolished for ever, it is Libby Purves’s story of the programme she presented for 33 years. In this brief memoir she has not only immortalised the distinctive flavour of the ‘And now for some lively conversation’ Wednesday-morning 45 minutes. She has also reminded us that Radio 4 is ‘basically, a marvel’: for many people, it is ‘their university and their friend’. All presenters, Purves writes, are aware that they are obsolescent.