What's available this April at Winstone's

Carl's best reads of the year (Image: Carl East)

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Booker Prize winning debut Shuggie Bain was always going to be a hard book to follow up.

For his second novel Glasgow born Stuart continues chronicling working-class lives with a moving story of the dangerous first love of two young men. Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the tough world of Glasgow’s housing estates, divided along sectarian lines.

To be seen as men the boys will have to be enemies, but having found sanctuary in James’s racing pigeons’ dovecote they become best friends and begin to fall in love. To escape their community would be a betrayal, and with Mungo’s elder brother a gang leader, retribution will be severe.

Imbuing the everyday banal world of its characters with rich lyricism, Young Mungo is a gripping modern ‘Romeo and Juliet’, about the meaning of masculinity, the bonds of family and the violence faced by many gay people

French Braid by Anne Tyler

In 2015 Tyler suggested she would retire with A Spool of Blue Thread as her final work. Thankfully that wasn’t the case and her last book Redhead By the Side of the Road was a Booker nominated bestseller and a Sidmouth reading group favourite.

Following Baltimore family, The Garretts from 1959 to present, French Braid is full of humour as well as heartbreak. Tyler has a reputation as a chronicler of domestic life but she has a particular knack of writing about masculinity and intimacy. The seven sections of the book are skilfully narrated from the viewpoint of a different family member from grandchild to parent.

Mother's Boy by Patrick Gale

Gale is a resident of Cornwall and the county plays a key part in his work. His new novel is a coming-of-age story following the life of the great Cornish poet Charles Causley.

Impoverished Cornish girl Laura, meets her husband in Teignmouth in 1916. They have a baby, Charles, but Laura’s husband returns home from the trenches of WW1 a damaged man, ill with the tuberculosis that will leave her a widow. In a small, class-obsessed town she raises the boy alone, gradually becoming aware that he is a poetic prodigy.

Charles signs up for the navy to escape the tight, gossipy confines of Launceston, the colour and violence of war sees him blossom as he experiences not only the possibility of death, but the constant danger of a love that is as clandestine as his work.

Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday

Halliday’s book is blockbuster Earth History, promising to do for Palaeontology what Noah Harari’s Sapiens did for history. It brings a fresh approach to illuminating deep time and the evolution of life on Earth.

The chapters work backwards across geological eras immersing the reader in the alien landscapes of the past from the mammoth populated steppe of Ice Age Alaska to the rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with colonies of giant penguins.

It’s a rare treat, a non-fiction book with an engaging emotional narrative. Contrasting the tenacity of life with the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including ours. the only constant being change. A lesson for us as we return the captured carbon of eons into the atmosphere.

The Ship Asunder: A Maritime History of Britain in Eleven Vessels by Tom Nancollas

Nancollas will be familiar to Sidmouth Seafest regulars from his talk in 2019 for his last book Seashaken Houses, the best book on lighthouses I have read.

The Ship Asunder takes a new approach to Britain’s Maritime history, by focussing on just 11 vessels and in particular on a significant artifact of each.

The chapters, such as The Prow, The Rope, The Bell, The Propeller etc, all give a new artefact-based approach to their subject and Tom’s lively and chatty writing style is always entertaining.