It is the enlightening, exquisitely written account, give or take a few autobiographical tangents, of a year in the life of James Rebanks (pictured), whose family has been farming in the Lake District for at least six centuries. He was born into a job from which, now in his 40s, he takes infinite pride. All the same, it is no life for the faint-hearted. Every year, spring and autumn feel like flimsy bookends to a long, harsh winter, and his Herdwick sheep - descended, he thinks, from animals that arrived with the Vikings - are built for the fells in ways that even the hardiest shepherds are not.
THIS WEEK'S REVIEWS
NEW FICTION
- MUST READS Lionel Sackville-West's on-off relationship with his lover Pepita, produced seven children.
- LITERARY FICTION When Bride walks into a room, she draws looks of envy and desire. But it wasn't always the way.
- HISTORICAL FICTION Just before the outbreak of World War I, Irene Benson, an English artist marries Thomas Curtius, a German architect, and moves to Berlin.
- POPULAR FICTION You only have to read the first page of a Wendy Holden novel to know that you can lean back and let the plot drive you off into the sunset.
- PSYCHOLOGICAL FICTION Catherine is happy until she starts reading a novel which details an incident in her life she's never told anyone about.
- CHICK LIT When Libby and Jason's expensive London lifestyle becomes unsustainable, they move back to his rural hometown.
- PICTURE BOOKS Each animal offers a miserable slug a suggestion based upon its own life.
THIS WEEK'S PAPERBACKS
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Don't trust a 'nun with a crutch' and look out for flashily dressed drug dealers! One customs officer reveals the extraordinary lengths people will go to
John Frost hilariously recounts stories from his career at London airports. Frost and his team have frequently detected drugs hidden in bizarre ways and animals being smuggled in even stranger ways. Frost has had 'to politely listen to people lying through their teeth at you' as they attempt to smuggle in snakes, bush meat (zebra, lion, gorilla), combs that double as flick-knives, a monkey sewn into the lining of a coat, another monkey 'disguised as a hairy child', corpses 'propped up in a wheelchair wearing wonky sunglasses' and a box of dry ice containing a man's buttock, apparently sliced off by a Samurai sword.
LITERARY NEWS
- Adrian Mole author Sue Townsend, 68, dies at her home in Leicester after a stroke
- New chapter in the history of the Bronte birthplace as new owners turn it into a cafe honouring the family's literary heritage
- Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, hospitalised with lung and urinary tract infections
- You don't need sex to sell! Dan Brown's Inferno tops Amazon best-seller list for 2013 as readers look for different thrills after Fifty Shades trilogy