Sam Leith
Richard Price’s meaty and fabulously enjoyable police procedural, Lush Life (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a book I have pressed on a lot of friends. The new Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather (Quercus, £16.99), is bliss, too, because it has Spenser, Hawk and the Gray Man in it. Short stories from Kurt Vonnegut (Armageddon in Retrospect, Cape, £16.99), and Annie Proulx (Fine Just The Way It Is, 4th Estate, £14.99) were moving, funny and wise.
In politics, Robert Kagan’s The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Atlantic, £12.99) offered a lucid account of the world order; while Joseph Stiglitz’s and Linda Bilmes’s The Three Trillion Dollar War (Allen Lane, £20) offered a similarly clear explanation of why the Iraq war, to paraphrase their argument, sucked cheese.
Lettres don’t get more belles than Robert Lowell’s and Elizabeth Bishop’s (Words in Air, Faber, £40). And J. G. Ballard’s Miracles of Life (4th Estate, £14.99) is testament to an extraordinary writer and a true mensch.
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