Charlotte Moore
Can Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey (Faber, £16.99) is the story of the Cooperative Correspondance Club, a secret magazine started in 1935, in which a group of women wrote frankly about everything that mattered to them. It’s an absorbing and moving account of 20th-century female experience, and was a big hit with my book club.
Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend (Viking, £25) is the first full biography for nearly 60 years. It is a well-judged, fair-minded and readable assessment of the astonishing achievements of this often impossible and endlessly fascinating genius.
In Unstrange Minds (Icon Books, £14.99) the American anthropologist, Roy Richard Grinker, explores the way different cultures define and respond to autism; this intelligent and original book opens important new areas in the autism debate.
Best collection of poems: Lip by Catherine Smith (Smith/Doorstop Books, £7.95).
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