Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
by Nicholas Shakespeare (Harvill Secker)
Shakespeare, renowned biographer of Bruce Chatwin, reveals a story worthy of a Bond novel in his life of Ian Fleming. The painstakingly researched yet fast-paced book explores Fleming’s childhood, dramatic war years and complex personal life and reveals how they shaped his hugely successful books.
The Secret Life of John le Carre
by Adam Sisman (Profile/Harper)
A follow-up to his 2015 biography of le Carré, who died in 2020, Sisman’s latest book exposes the great spy writer’s duplicitous and deceitful relationships with the women in his life, providing new insights into the secret life of the man behind George Smiley. A fascinating, revelatory appendix to Sisman’s fuller life.
Osip Mandelstam: A Biography
by Ralph Dutli, translated by Ben Fowkes (Verso)
This life of “legendary literary saint”, Osip Mandelstam, provides a timely reminder of both the long history of repression in Russia and the powerful role that literature can play when in the right hands. Dutli’s rounded portrait of the Russian poet unafraid to speak truth to power brings to life the man and his time.
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
by Anna Funder (Viking/Knopf)
Funder, author of Stasiland, her prizewinning account of the East German secret police, takes six letters written by Eileen O’Shaughnessy, George Orwell’s first wife, as the imaginative springboard for a deep dive into their relationship and her impact on his writing and legacy. A haunting, tragic and revealing book.
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
by Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus)
A former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary herself, Ogilvie has written a “people’s history” of the great literary endeavour. Begun in 1879, the OED is an epic, crowdsourced attempt to pin down slippery, evolving language and this book tells the fascinating story of the eclectic and unsung contributors to this living monument to language.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
by Nathan Thrall (Allen Lane/Metropolitan Books)
This quietly heartbreaking work of non-fiction reads like a novel. At its centre is a tragic road accident outside Jerusalem in the West Bank from which Thrall, a Jewish American journalist, carefully traces the labyrinthine lives of those involved and the tangled web of politics, history and culture that ensnare them all.
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