Turning over plenty of new leaves with a feast of festive book choices

8:00am Saturday 12th December 2009

By Philippa May

BRIAN Viner, local author and Independent columnist, turns his attention to the TV programmes that defined a generation in a book that looks back at the era that gave the world Fawlty Towers and Porridge, A Bouquet of Barbed Wire and I, Claudius.

Watching the box will never again be the collective experience it was then, and Brian Viner pays tribute to an era in TV which happily coincided with his own formative years.

THIS is the first novel of barrister- turned TV scriptwriter and former Hereford Cathedral School student Matthew Hall, and the first of a projected series featuring coroner Jenny Cooper.

The story revolves around the issue of the imprisonment of children as Jenny, the newly appointed Severn Vale coroner, delves into two apparently unconnected deaths while struggling with her own demons. (Pan, £6.99)

THE third novel featuring Rev Francis Oughterard, vicar of St Botolph’s and genteel murderer of parishioner Mrs Elizabeth Fotherington.

So far eluding arrest (but with fears of imminent exposure), he is in the grip of his blackmailing pal, the shady Nicholas Ingaza who forces him to steal a valuable figurine of a prancing pig from a collector. (Constable and Robinson, £18.99)

■ Pigsties and Paradise – Lady Diarists and the Tour of Wales, 1795-1860 by Liz Pitman

AN illuminating selection of the journal entries of the women who travelled to the Marches and beyond, more than a hundred years ago, collected by Liz Pitman from the many handwritten and previously unpublished diaries she found in record offices around the country.

IN her third novel, Jo Brand, patron of The Courtyard and Megan Baker House in Leominster, draws on her experience as a psychiatric nurse to explore how mental illness affects families through the story of 15-yearold Alice and her mad-as-abox- of-frogs mother, Gina.

THIS year also saw the publication of Jo’s autobiography, Look Back in Hunger.

From her early years growing up in a small south coast town with two brothers who toughened her up, to emerging on stage as ‘The Sea Monster’, Jo tells it like it was, and is, with candour and a sense of the ridiculous.

■ The Ledbury Lamplighters by Kerry Tombs ON New Year's Eve 1888, just days after the arrival of a mysterious stranger, a prominent local businessman is murdered in full view of partygoers as the Ledbury Lamplighters see out the year by extinguishing the town's lamps.

THE autobiography of James Roose-Evans, a distinguished, award-winning theatre director and the first to be ordained a non-stipendiary priest.

THE seventh book in the series about house-sitter Thea, who always finds herself embroiled in murders and mysteries in idyllic, yet not-so-innocent, Cotswold villages.

Rebecca lives on a smallholding in rural Herefordshire, rearing Cotswold sheep for their wool and Tamworth and Berkshire pigs for meat. She is membership secretary of the Crime Writers’ Association.

SET at the turn of the millennium, extending into 2071, this Tenbury author offers an alternative vision of the world and its future. It takes place in a parallel universe and centres on blues singer Kim Barnes and rough sleeper Frank McCombie.

MORE than 1,700 oil paintings from public collections in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire are presented for the first time in a stunning new catalogue published by The Public Catalogue Foundation.

The catalogue, priced at £25, is available from the participating collections, all good bookshops and from thepcf.org.uk.

AFTER Peter Sellers, Laurence Olivier, Charles Hawtrey and Anthony Burgess, the renowned biographer Roger Lewis has at last found the monstrous subject that fascinates him most – himself...

Inspired by the round robin letters people send with the Christmas cards, Lewis’s version contains nothing but woe, his own and that which he finds in the pages of the Hereford Times.

Here is misanthropy and misery in spades, ideal if you’re seeking an antidote to all that festive cheer. Imagine Victor Meldrew, magnified a hundredfold and more.

A COLLECTION of true life cases demonstrating that in every county there are always people who, for one reason or another, are prepared to take a human life.

Included in the grisly line up is the murder of Catherine Lewis by John Mapp at Longden, Christmas 1867; the horrific axe murders committed by John Doughty at Church Stretton in 1924; and the tragic death of Dennis O’Neill, who was beaten and starved by his foster parents in 1945.

LUDLOW is the setting for a stylish upmarket thriller described by the actor, Patrick Malahide, as “…intelligent, satisfyingly complex and having a whiff of le Carre”.

His novel tells the intriguing story of a ménage a trois between a retired diplomat, his once beautiful wife and the enigmatic Jewish man she saved from the Nazis.

ROBERT Rogers provides an insider’s tour of the extraordinary institution that is Parliament. He explains everything from what’s in the dispatch boxes to the origin of the clock chimes. Discover what a ferret is used for, where the peregrine falcons nest, and what Churchill thought about broadcasting the Commons.

Entertaining and humorous, there is something of interest for everyone in this fascinating and informative collection Robert Rogers is the Clerk Assistant of the House of Commons and co-author of How Parliament Works, now in its sixth edition.

■ Merrily’s Border: The Marches Share Their Secrets by Phil Rickman and John Mason

THE Marches share their secrets with novelist Phil Rickman and photographer John Mason “This book,” says Phil Rickman, author of the Merrily Watkins series of novels, “is a result of all the letters and emails which come in from readers who say how real the books feel.

“As John Mason’s pictures demonstrate, virtually all the locations are real, and so is much of the background – history, legend, folklore and customs. Essentially this is a guide to some of the more mysterious elments along the mid and southern Welsh Border, though I’ve tried not to reveal key details of my fictional plots.”

FROM the author of the hightly acclaimed Boudica novels, Rome is the first in a new series of novels set amid the bloodshed, chaos, heroism and murderous betrayal of ancient Rome.

■ The Ant Colony and Iggy and Me by Jenny Valentine THE third novel from the author of Finding Violet Park and Broken Soup, The Ant Colony features 17- year-old Sam who leaves home and finds himself in a run-down rooming house where his life collides with 10-year-old Bohemia's, leading both of them to the possibility of a happy ending.

Iggy and Me, also published in 2009, is a collection of stories for younger readers about the joys of sisterhood. (The Ant Colony, HarperCollins, £6.99. Iggy and Me, HarperCollins, £4.99)

HAVING taken a potshot at the 50 People who Buggered up Britain in his first book, Letts turns his acid wit on Britain’s insistence on equality and the resultant culture of mediocrity.

His targets include ladettes, middle- class tattoo wearers and Jonathan Ross, but he raises a cheer for, among others, Simon Cowell and Hyacinth Bucket.

THE former Cathedral Junior School head’s first book for children, the first in a series about fossil characters aimed at young children.

A VISUAL history of Leominster in the very early years of photography based on Tim Ward's collection of postcards, photographs and other ephemera, grouped by streets.

■ Orchard – a Year in the Life of a Herefordshire Cider Orchard by Gareth Rees-Roberts

A VISUAL contemplation of a year in the life of a mature six-acre cider orchard. Gareth Rees-Roberts, an associate of the Royal Photographic Society, has lived in the Welsh Marches for more than 30 years, working as a musician and instrumental teacher, and as a freelance photographer. (Logaston Press, £15)

MARK Townsend served as a Church of England priest for more than 10 years, resigning from full time ministry in 2007 to work as a magician and spiritual writer.

His new book is the story of a man who has wrestled with questions, searched for meaning and found it in the most unexpected places. (O Books, £11.99)

SUBTITLED “..and other Bolivian dreams - and nightmares”, The House on the Sacred Lake describes how Margaret Anstee made her home in Bolivia after taking the job of UN resident representative in the country and began a love affair with Bolivia and its people that remains undimmed half a century later.

THE best-selling author set his most recent thriller in Ludlow, a town he knows well from his childhood.

The Dying Light centres on the growing extent to which we as a society are monitored, and creates a frighteningly credible picture of where we’re headed, our every move watched, every piece of information about every one of us collected and collated until any freedom we have is little more than an illusion. (Orion Books, £12.99)

A FULLY illustrated guide by food and nutrition expert Judith Wills from Brilley on how to create the larder you need to create nutritious, cost-effective meals.

Includes a wide range of recipes from snacks to salads, main meals to preserves and home baking.

JOHNNY Arkwright (1833-1905), grandson of the ‘richest commoner in Europe’, inherited Hampton Court, Herefordshire, at the age of 24.

The 60 years of ‘champagne and shambles’ between Johnny’s 21st birthday in 1854 and the First World War are brought to life by Catherine Beale, using Johnny’s own letters to reveal how it felt to lose such a rich inheritance.