Living the dream

WHEN you think of people upping sticks and living the good life, you perhaps don’t dwell on things such as the unreliable water supplies or lengthy legal wrangles carried out in a second language.

But happily, Chris Stewart, the former Genesis drummer turned author, is back with Last Days Of The Bus Club. Like his bestseller, Driving Over Lemons, this is another humorous guide to the realities of living in Southern Spain.

He gives a funny, touching and realistic take on living the dream with richly told tales of cooking for TV chef Rick Stein, gorging on plate after plate of tuna for a food competition and going to see a barefoot doctor about a rather personal problem.

Full of vividly drawn descriptions of his neighbours, playful passages about cultural differences and a touching recollection of himself and wife Ana bidding adieu to their beloved daughter Chloe as she heads off for university, Last Days Of The Bus Club is a lively, pragmatic account of the good life.

Keeley Bolger

My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff (Bloomsbury, £16.99, ebook £14.99) 4/5 stars

THIS is a book for book lovers; not only those who love stories, but those fascinated with peeking “behind the curtain”. A memoir spanning a year, it tells of Joanna’s life working in a prestigious literary agency in New York in the mid- 1990s. JD Salinger was one of the agency’s biggest clients. Joanna begins to form a relationship with him and, more importantly, his fans.

The volume of post sent for him is overwhelming, and there is a rote response that Joanna is meant to use. Yet the poignancy of these letters from fans, ranging from veterans to students, gets to Joanna, and she modifies her responses, acting as Salinger’s mouthpiece.

Intertwined is the story of her personal life: her anti-establishment boyfriend, Don; living on a shoestring; friends moving away.

It’s a magnificent portrait of a fascinating year; a pleasure to read.

Emma Bateman

A-Z Of Hell: Ross Kemp’s How Not To Travel The World (Century, £12.99, ebook £6.02) 3/5 stars

MANY know him as tough guy Grant Mitchell in EastEnders, but in real life, Ross Kemp has played the part of a daredevil in some of the world’s most dangerous places.

He has his tongue firmly in his cheek at some points and is certainly a more likeable chap than Mitchell, so it’s hard not to get swept away with the shocking stories involving him and his camera crew.

The book is helpfully organised and it features photographs of Kemp’s travels. But it holds little interest for those outside his loyal fan base.

Catherine Wylie

Meadowland: The Private Life Of An English Field by John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday, £14.99, ebook £6.49) 4/5 stars 

HISTORIAN and farmer John Lewis-Stempel’s family have lived in Herefordshire for 700 years and a sense of history pervades this chronicle of wrens and robins, campion and dandelion clocks, moles and badgers, in the life of his meadow, simply told month by month.

It’s the vignettes that suck us in: how beggars used the juice of the ubiquitous meadow buttercup to blister their skin for sympathy; how flirtatious wrens court in the spring; and how the curlew lands 20 yards from its nest, creeping in on foot so predators don’t follow its descent directly to the chicks.

He is delighted and fascinated by his small corner of the earth, from its resident fox family to its biodiverse cow dung. It’s enough to make any reader want their own meadowland.

Kitty Wheater

Dangerous Days On the Victorian Railways by Terry Deary (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £9.99, ebook £3.99) 3/5 stars 

TERRY DEARY achieved great success with his Horrible Histories for children and his latest offering is the second in a series for adults.

He strips away myth and romanticism and focuses on fatal rail accidents and how the arrival of the railway age triggered a tsunami of greed and financial speculation, as private companies jostled for franchises. Rail lines were bulldozed and blasted into cities, often through slum areas, with scant regard for the welfare of those whose homes had been flattened.

This idiosyncratic book will appeal to rail buffs, social history fans and people with a voyeuristic interest in accidents, but the endless gruesome details might prove too much for the squeamish.

Anthony Looch