This week's new releases reviewed
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L Hopp and Camille Kingsolver Faber and Faber £8.99
The subtitle of this book is "Our year of seasonal eating", and that is what Kingsolver describes. The author of The Poisonwood Bible, her husband, Hopp, and their daughters moved from Tuscon to their hitherto part-time farm in Virginia and resolved to eat only food grown locally, mainly in their own garden, for a full year. The result is a beautifully written plea for a return to authenticity in eating and in food production. There are lovely, lyrical descriptions of visits to friends who are organic farmers and artisan producers - watching swallows dip and swoop over evening cornfields, eating mouth-
watering suppers of homegrown produce. In accompanying side panels Kingsolver and Hopp, an environmental scientist, give the grim facts - and figures - about the US food industry. And she dismantles the myth that eating locally grown or organic produce is a preserve of the affluent: her friends include an Amish farmer and the people running a workers' organic diner. Her daughter Camille contributes recipes. A tasty polemic. - Cathy Dillon
In Your Face Lia Mills Penguin, £7.99
It doesn't look like a book about cancer, with its smiley face on the cover. It looks like a cheeky, celebratory book - which is what it is. But it's also a horror story. In early 2006, after going to the dentist about a lump in her cheek - and being repeatedly palmed off with the kind of gel you give to teething babies - Mills was diagnosed with an "invasive non-differentiated squamous cell carcinoma". Like most of us, she wasn't really aware that it's possible to get cancer of the face. Unlike most of us, she survived the removal of much of her jaw, a tracheostomy, a skin graft from her leg and a living hell of feeding tubes, infections and - just for good measure - a fractured ankle, with her sense of humour and sense of self-worth firmly intact. She also took notes as she went along, which allowed her to produce an uncommonly vivid retelling of her experiences, warts, heroes, villains and all. It makes the book as easy to read, and ultimately as life-affirming as a chat with a very good friend. - Arminta Wallace
Gifted Nikita Lalwani Penguin, £7.99
This first novel by Nikita Lalwani is about a young maths prodigy growing up in Cardiff. Shortlisted last year for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Man Booker prize, Gifted brilliantly evokes the teenage dislocation of Rumi, who struggles to come to terms with her new identity as the town's "math genius". Forced into strict study routines by her father, Rumi becomes alienated from her friends, withdrawing into a world of mathematical equations and an addiction to cumin seeds. As the child of Indian parents, Rumi gets caught up in her parents' ambivalent relationship with their adoptive country. While her mother grows hostile to the mixed identity of her adolescent daughter, Rumi's father becomes fanatical about discipline, determined his daughter will make a mark on their new home country. This is a sad, tender story about a family on the verge of ruin, kept upbeat by Lalwani's simple style and the young, sometimes daredevil mind of Rumi. - Sorcha Hamilton
Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War Virginia Nicholson Penguin, £8.99
"War killed a generation of husbands; it also stole the future from those who would have become their wives." Singled Out is the story of the women of the first World War, who grew up into a world without men. These "Surplus Women", as they were called, were forced to change the society they lived in, push the boundaries of choices available, and carve out alternative routes to happiness and fulfilment. The book is a tribute to their spirit and courage, celebrating pioneers in fields from archeology to stockbroking. Nicholson does not flinch from the hardships they faced, but shows that although their lives were often hard and sometimes lonely, these women were anything but superfluous. Singled Out is a delicate, nuanced portrait, sympathetic but never patronising, of inspiring women who, though robbed of the chance to be mothers and grandmothers, created a world of possibilities for future generations of women. Nicholson shows how great a debt is owed them. - Eimear Nolan
At A Time Like This Catherine Dunne Pan Macmillan. £6.99
In the 25 years since they first met as Arts students in Trinity College in Dublin, Georgie, Maggie, Claire and Nora have seen each other through the trials of exams, heart-breaks, marriages, and business ventures. Things haven't always gone smoothly for the quartet and they've had their differences, some betrayals, and secrets, but they've managed to weather each successive storm. Until now. On the night they are to celebrate their silver anniversary of friendship, a new situation reveals the possibility of happiness for one of the gang, and a huge shock for all the others. In this, her seventh book, Dunne's deft storytelling casts a realistic but compassionate eye on the close connections that are formed between women, and how they shape their lives. - Claire Looby