Dam Buster
Richard Morris
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £28, pp520
The popular myth of Barnes Wallis – and one to which the title of Richard Morris’s fascinating biography alludes – is that of the man who designed the “bouncing bomb” that was used to indelible effect in second world war sorties. In fact, Wallis was in the unenviable position of being one of Britain’s most talented engineers who was nevertheless under-appreciated in his lifetime and since, wartime efforts aside. Morris, who calls Wallis “a 20th-century Victorian”, does a sterling job of re-establishing his reputation as an innovator in countless fields, in highly readable fashion.
The Cameraman
Matthew Kneale
Atlantic, £16.99, pp288
If the title I Am a Camera had not already been taken, it would be the perfect name for Matthew Kneale’s panoramic new novel, an account of a fascist-sympathising British family’s travels through Europe in 1934, written with appropriately cinematic precision. Kneale’s protagonist, Julius Sewell, a former film cameraman who has recently been institutionalised, finds himself examining his own apparent mental instabilities afresh when he is confronted by vignettes that mix farce with horror, as it becomes increasingly clear that Italy and Germany are on the edge of a precipice.
The Perfect Golden Circle
Benjamin Myers
Bloomsbury, £8.99, pp256 (paperback)
It is a great compliment to say that the storyline of Benjamin Myers’s much-lauded The Perfect Golden Circle, in which two mismatched men spend a summer together in 1989 forming crop circles in a bid to find much-needed catharsis, has something of the elegiac, pastoral feel of JL Carr’s A Month in the Country. Yet Myers’s view of England is wilder and more primal than Carr’s, and his obvious love of the countryside is matched by a harder-edged sensibility that is nevertheless lightened by humour and flashes of soaring lyricism.
• To order Dam Buster, The Cameraman or The Perfect Golden Circle go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
