Robert Seethaler’s bestselling novel, Ein ganzes Leben, translated by Charlotte Collins as A Whole Life (Picador, £12.99) is the unaccountably gripping story of a half-crippled, simple-minded orphan in the Austrian Alps scraping a living from a stony field and slaving for a cable-car construction firm. It takes barely two hours to read it but would take a lifetime to forget.
Some biographies are worth reading however slight one’s prior interest in the subject. I particularly enjoyed Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s sensitive, canny and erudite biography of Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland (Harvill Secker, £25). John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus, £25) is Ruth Scurr’s bold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life.
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