Tales from the Dancefloor
Sacha Lord
HarperNorth, £22, pp320
Sacha Lord is the Manchester promoter and night-time economy adviser who shaped the city’s nightlife after the Haçienda years into something safer, more lasting – and commercial. As he puts it in this memoir, the derelict areas that he used to brave for club nights now have Michelin-starred restaurants. But his run-ins with shady characters or the drug-related escapades that power most of these tales lack weight. Enjoyable, sure, but it’s the tracklists at the end that really endure.
The Curse of Pietro Houdini
Derek B Miller
Doubleday, £18.99, pp359
The American novelist Miller is having real fun with his seventh novel, a compellingly chaotic blend of art-heist thriller, wartime adventure, historical epic and coming-of-age drama. Ostensibly this is the story of a young Italian orphan entrusted by the charismatic “master of art restoration” Pietro Houdini with getting masterpieces out of a Nazi-occupied monastery. But Miller throws in enough twists and surprises, black humour and traumatic episodes on their quest to keep the narrative pace as high as the moral ambiguities and complex identities he also plays with.
The Earth Transformed
Peter Frankopan
Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp736 (paperback)
It’s quite the claim to be proposing a new, “untold history of the world” over 736 pages. But Peter Frankopan does a remarkable job of attempting just that in this reframing of everything that has happened on this planet through the natural world and changing environment. The (very) general proposal here is that there are lessons to be had about how droughts, famines, eruptions and floods have led to the rise and fall of empires, prosperity and slavery, war and pandemics. Worryingly, he suggests, the future seems more uncertain than ever.
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