2012 is done. Here is the final selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Happy 2013.
Susan Hill
Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author (Saltyard Books, £20). The writer started a daily blog about his life in Spitalfields — people, jobs, buildings, street life, monuments. A whole piece of London is here, ghosts of Spitalfields’ past haunting the vibrant present. It is unlike any other book.
Two excellent thrillers by two rising stars. Safe House by Chris Ewan (Faber, £14.99) is set on an Isle of Man as you never imagined it and has one of the best new heroines for a long time. Whereas Shadow of the Rock, the first book by Thomas Mogford (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is partly set on Gibraltar. It’s exciting and assured — with a hero wonderfully called Spike Sanguinetti. These two show popular fiction at its best.
The Fishing Fleet by Anne de Courcy, (Weidenfeld, £20) is the richly evocative story of the women who sailed out to the Indian Raj in search of husbands.
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