We round up the new releases from Philippa Gregory, Richard Osman, Sebastian Faulks and Patricia Cornwell.
RRP: £25 (HarperCollins)
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, why wouldn’t you?
Lady-in-waiting Jane Boleyn served five queens. She survived her mistress Anne Boleyn, as well as her husband, Anne’s brother, George. She looked away when they came for her sponsor and spymaster, Thomas Cromwell.
History has judged her a snake in the grass, but Gregory – returning to the Tudors after almost a decade – imagines an astute woman more sinned against than sinning. An immersive visit to the Court of Henry VIII with its magnificence and machinations, its pageantry and plotting, all the more harrowing if you know how it ends.
And the moral? In a nest of vipers, make like a viper.
RRP: £22 (Viking)
Joyce has organised a wedding – she’s a mother-in-law! Widowed Elizabeth is still grieving, but when the best man confesses that he fears for his life, the Thursday Murder Club reconvenes to crack a code that is a key to unimaginable wealth.
Far from resting on his laurels, Osman just gets better, and his beloved characters are now so thoroughly established, they’ve taken on a life of their own.
RRP: £20 (Hutchinson Heinemann)
Greetings, pop pickers. If you remember Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops, the mincer clamped to the kitchen table, Peter Dominic’s Carafino, first kisses, smoking Ducados and dancing to Je t’aime, Faulks’s essays will waft you back in time.
Don’t let anyone tell you that nostalgia is not what it used to be. The fact is that the past is, as he says, much funnier in retrospect. Not ’arf!
RRP: £22 (Sphere)
It’s a tacky Christmas in Northern Virginia, where a serial killer is at large, taunting his targets with a “ghost” hologram.
Meanwhile, chief medical examiner Dr Kay Scarpetta is dicing and slicing cadavers, investigating a suspected drowning, even as her thoughts turn to the banal and quotidian – making lasagne, making love.
And the scariest part? The technologies that are creeping into our lives.
RRP: £25 (Virago)
Ahead of Halloween, 13 of Du Maurier’s spine-tingling (long) short stories have been brought together for the first time to creep us out.
We have The Birds, of course, and Don’t Look Now, but less well-known tales are just as dark, brooding, ambiguous, and the stuff of nightmares.
Each one of the tales, writes Stephen King in a new foreword, has the “gotta” factor: you just gotta keep on reading.
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The singer-songwriter on being diagnosed with ADHD at 70 and how she’s ageing on her own terms.
The TV star chats about health, her love of sprouts and why she’s been proven right about the detox diet.
This frank documentary about the comedian’s European tour reveals the realities of travelling in your 80s.
The baking queen on celebrating her 90th birthday, her daily indulgence and why her husband Paul thinks “cooking is boring”.
The presenter on being sacked by the BBC and why her views are 'career suicide'.
