Bookcase – a round-up of the week’s latest releases (From Darlington and Stockton Times)

Bookcase – a round-up of the week’s latest releases

2:23pm Friday 26th June 2009

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NEW FICTION

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon is published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, priced £18.99.

The five-year wait for the follow up to The Shadow Of The Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon has been worth it.

Readers are sent back to the winding streets of old Barcelona and to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, created in his first novel.

This time we read of David Martin, a young man orphaned in childhood and helped throughout his life by rich aristocrat Pedro Vidal.

Vidal finds David an impressive job - as a horror writer for a crooked publisher. And while he’s penning a dark series for his new employer, a mysterious letter arrives at his door.

A Parisian publisher called Andreas Corelli is making David an offer he cannot refuse. But the deal comes at a price, and that price only becomes clear when David starts to unravel connections between his house and mysterious boss.

This is a pleasure to read and is addictive.

9/10

NEW NON-FICTION

Churchill’s Bunker: The Secret Headquarters At The Heart Of Britain’s Victory by Richard Holmes is published in hardback by Profile Books, priced £14.99.

It seems typical of Winston Churchill that pre-war plans for the Cabinet to evacuate London came to nothing when the Nazi bombers finally arrived.

He, his senior ministers and staff simply shifted instead to a warren of offices –slightly more protected but never fully bomb-proof – in what is now the Treasury.

Churchill’s Bunker is the story of what became known as the Cabinet War Rooms and the wider logistical difficulties facing a government at daily risk of being bombed by the Luftwaffe.

Scholarly but accessible, historian Holmes’ book also charts the progress of the conflict and the Allied diplomacy that shaped the post-1945 peace.

8/10

There Will Be Rainbows – A Biography of Rufus Wainwright by Kirk Lake is published in hardback by Orion Books, priced £18.99.

You don’t have to be a fan of Rufus Wainwright’s music to find his life-story interesting. The singer is only 35, but he has already had an extremely colourful past.

Lake builds a thorough and detailed examination of the troubled star born into a world of show business but since tortured by demons.

7/10

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