Leaf Arbuthnot

2 weeks ago | dailymail.co.uk | Leaf Arbuthnot

PROOF by Adam Kucharski (Profile £22, 368 pp)In the early 1920s, a scientist named Ronald Fisher poured a cup of tea and offered it to his colleague Muriel Bristol. She refused it on the basis that she liked her tea with milk added first. Bristol was sceptical that she could tell the difference, but Bristol insisted, and so they came up with a test. Eight cups of tea were prepared – four with milk added before the tea, the rest with milk added after – and Bristol blind-tasted them.

2 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Leaf Arbuthnot

The American author Katie Kitamura first won renown with her fourth book Intimacies, which was tipped by Barack Obama as one of his 2021 "summer reading" picks. The novel tells, in Kitamura's unadorned prose, the story of an interpreter who moves to The Hague, where she finds herself translating the words of an African war criminal accused of ethnic cleansing. She also discovers - even worse - that her boyfriend is secretly married to another woman.

1 month ago | dailymail.co.uk | Leaf Arbuthnot

Breaking Bread by David Wright (Aurum £18.99, 272pp)When David Wright was born, his birth was announced in the window display of his family bakery in Suffolk with a riot of blue balloons and teddy bears. He was later to take over the business, and presided over its closure after 75 years, a trauma he is still evidently struggling to come to terms with. In his book, he sets out to describe ‘how baking shaped our world’, and does so perfectly well.

1 month ago | dailymail.co.uk | Leaf Arbuthnot

Mother Animal by Helen Jukes (Elliott & Thompson £16.99, 224pp)When the writer Helen Jukes became pregnant, she found herself navigating the usual maze of edicts and advice: don’t eat this, don’t drink that, avoid cat litter and overly hot baths, don’t be anxious.

2 months ago | telegraph.co.uk | Leaf Arbuthnot

The best-known contemporary novel to unfold over the course of a single day remains Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), about a gifted surgeon with affectionate children, a wife to whom he still makes love, and a covetable house in Fitzrovia. Alice Chadwick’s debut, Dark Like Under, also takes place over one day, but its characters are more earthy: a ragtag bunch of teenagers in 1980s England, squaring up to their futures as their clapped-out teachers look nervously on.