MUST READS
Thinking on my feet by Kate Humble (Aster £9.99, 304 pp)
Thinking on my feet
by Kate Humble (Aster £9.99, 304pp)
TV presenter, farmer and writer Kate Humble elevates one of the most basic of human activities — walking — into an inspirational and spiritual therapy as she records a year of her life through the footpaths she hikes and the people she meets.
‘For me,’ she says, ‘walking is as vital as breathing.’ Yet despite the fact it’s free and needs no equipment apart from comfortable shoes, few of us reach the recommended 10,000 steps a day unless we’re shut away in an expensive gym.
Whether she’s tramping the wet and windy Welsh hills near her home or panting up a steep slope in the heat of northern India, Humble reminds us that connecting with nature and the people who cross your path is an enriching experience that can restore your faith in humanity.
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Calypso by David Sedaris (Abacus £9.99, 259pp)
Calypso
by David Sedaris (Abacus £9.99, 259pp)
The humorist Sedaris has been described as an American Alan Bennett for his bestselling, wryly funny autobiographical essays.
He is familiar to Radio 4 listeners for his entertaining accounts of picking up litter from around his Sussex home, where a bin lorry has been named in his honour.
David’s eccentric family have always been a rich source of comic material, and they reappear here as guests at The Sea Section, the cottage on the Carolina coast that he bought to fulfil a childhood dream of owning ‘a beach house that would be everyone’s, as long as they followed my draconian rules and never stopped thanking me’.
There is a mordant tone to the comedy as he chronicles the indignities of middle age, while a tinge of melancholy haunts the highlight of the collection, Untamed, a beautiful essay about a fox named Carol.
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber £8.99, 544pp)
Unsheltered
by Barbara Kingsolver (Faber £8.99, 544pp)
‘The simplest thing would be to tear it down,’ a surveyor tells Willa Knox, who has inherited a decrepit house in New Jersey.
It is the latest blow in a list of family disasters: her academic husband has lost his job, her hippyish daughter and ailing father-in-law are both living at home.
As Willa prepares to tell her family the house is condemned, her son calls, distraught: his partner has killed herself, leaving him with a newborn baby.
Desperate to keep the family together, Willa makes an unexpected discovery.
Barbara Kingsolver’s eighth novel weaves together the stories of two families living in turbulent times, 150 years apart.
Diligently researched (Kingsolver’s 19th-century heroine, biologist Mary Treat, is a historical figure who corresponded with Charles Darwin), Unsheltered is a compelling study of our human need for shelter and stability.
