Andrew Barrow
How I would love to be recommending Mary Killen's wonderful first novel in this slot. Alas, this impatiently awaited book is still unwritten or stuck at Chapter Three. I can only hope for better news next year.
Meanwhile, various ancient and modem non-fiction books have caught my atten- tion. Virginia Woolf s four volumes of Col- lected Essays (Hogarth, £30 each) must contain some the finest, most argumenative writing of the century. Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould's Secret (Cape, £9.99) is a superbly detailed, compassionate account of an educated tramp, and Philip Ziegler's Oswald Sitwell (Chatto, £25) brims over with life and pace and 'texture'.
This year, I've also bought half a dozen antiquarian cookery books at Hayward Hill but only one contemporary one. Two Fat Ladies Full Throttle by Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson-Wright (Ebury, £19.99) by no means scrapes the bottom of the saucepan. The continuing, now world- wide success of the 'roly-poly' couple is one of the nicest things to happen in modern times.
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