What to read in October

Our pick

The Glass Maker - Tracy Chevalier

HarperCollins - RRP: £20

It is 1486 on Murano, across the lagoon from Venice, where young Orsola Rosso is quietly teaching herself to create exquisite beads that will one day adorn the necks of empresses, to support her family while her elder brother mismanages the family workshop.

A twist of the kaleidoscope and it’s 1574, but Orsola, like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, has scarcely aged (Venice does not bend to the universal laws of time).

Another twist, and another, and the dazzling picture changes again and again, in a novel that sweeps us on a breathtaking journey across centuries, to Paris, to Vienna, through the Enlightenment, plagues, war, love and heartbreak.

An absolute pearl of a novel from the maestra.

The Drowned - John Banville

Faber & Faber - RRP £18.99

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In a repressed, repressive 1950s Ireland, Banville’s DI Strafford and pathologist Quirke must pull together to solve the mystery of a wife reported missing, presumed drowned.

Their relationship is fractious as ever. The local garda are worse than useless, and the wrong man is in the frame. Banville’s prose flows like Guinness: dark, bitter, with a head of froth.

The ending left me aching for more – and there will be more!

Here One Moment - Liane Moriarty

Penguin Books - RRP £22

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There is turbulence aboard a delayed flight from Hobart to Sydney, when a petite septuagenarian named Cherry rises from her seat and foretells the year and manner of death of everyone aboard.

She’s nuts, right?

But then, on cue, people start dying, and a group of characters turn to each other for support. So who exactly is Cherry? She will tell you herself, as all becomes clear.

Ingenious!

The Women Behind the Door - Roddy Doyle

Penguin Books - RRP £20

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At 66, former battered wife Paula no longer ‘walks into doors’. Your man, Charlo, is long dead. She’s off the booze and life is OK, life is grand.

Then, amid Covid, her eldest, Nicola, ‘Little Miss Perfect’, shows up at her door in the throes of a breakdown, and it’s all lockdown love and bitterness and bickering.

It’s a masterclass in dialogue from the bard of the bog ordinary.

Flint - Joanne Bourne

Eye Books - RRP £14.99

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Keep an eye out for Neolithic arrowheads as you walk the North Downs in the endlessly diverting company of this archaeologist author.

Bourne interweaves the factual and fanciful, prehistory, culture, folklore and a profound love of nature, in this paean to Earth’s second-hardest substance.

Lyrical, wise, whimsical, sparky as the ancient fire-starter itself, and at moments hilarious.

The last line made me cry.