I’ve not been reading much in the last few weeks, as writing, house guests, work and busy weekends have crowded it out, and I am really looking forward to a summer of devouring books. But I have managed three interesting and very different offerings this April and May, the first of which was The Fraud by Zadie Smith, one of my favourite authors (see my blog on NW). Unlike her other books, this one is historical fiction and is set in literary Britain in the 1870s, examining the family and friends of real-life author William Ainsworth and the Tichborne trial, which gripped the nation for its duration, as well as Victorian attitudes to slavery in the Caribbean. I never benefitted from full immersion in this book and its short chapters and my picking it up and putting it down with often long gaps in between meant I never quite got lost in this world.

Next up was listening to the audiobook of Happy Mind, Happy Life by Rangan Chatterjee. This is full of good, practical and evidence-based advice on how to deal with the stresses of modern life in a world of technology, work and family life. As I listened to it on various long drives to see family and friends, it was useful revision of a lot of the research on happiness (see my blogs) and I’d recommend it for anyone looking for some easy to follow but life-changing tips.

Finally, I bought the much talked about All Fours by Miranda July as an airport paperback on my way home from a bank holiday weekend away. It’s a fascinating dive into mid-life desire, parenting and marriage and what can happen when you throw it all up in the air, as the protagonist does when she ditches a cross-continent road trip only 30 miles in and holes up in a motel room to explore who she is and what she wants to be. This great perimenopause novel even includes a graph about the precipitous drop of oestrogen that women experience as a cliff after forty years of stability, as if it is so shocking (it is) that a textural description alone would not have been enough to make the point. It was refreshing to read a novel centred around the rollercoaster experience that half the population goes through (see my blog on Cracking the Menopause).