Jane Gardam
The best psychological thriller I've read for years is The Last Girl by Penelope Evans (Black Swan, £5.99) who is classicist, barris- ter, wife and mother, lives in Surrey and as far as I know has received no reviews of this her first book. It is extraordinarily powerful, beautifully constructed, deep into the bodies and minds of both the psychopath in his evil dreams and the inno- cent in her awful loneliness. It would not leave me. Much more moving than the usual bestselling psycho-intellectual stuff. Graham Greene would have admired this book.
Lovely to read again the reprint of The Worm Forgives the Plough (Penguin Classics, £7.99) by John Stewart Collis, the old ecologist and poet who died in 1984. His style now reads a little quaint but the poetic vision and the depth of knowledge of the countryside, his learning and passion for science and ecology are true as ever. Funny and beautiful. Sometimes he pre- tends to be dotty (one essay begins 'I am anxious to say a word about the pota- to') and it takes a sentence or two to realise you have read nothing like this before.
I had a galloping entertaining time with Aristocrats by Stella Tillyard (Chatto, £20). It is hugely researched and seriously writ- ten, but the four great granddaughters of Charles II defy stodge. They had wild adventures, political and otherwise, in England, France and Ireland, producing hordes of remarkable children (one sister had 22) and never stopped writing to each other for over half a century. A gaudy world, astoundingly wealthy, distant as Cleopatra.
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