Books of the month: From August Blue by Deborah Levy to Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Martin Chilton reviews the biggest new books for May in our monthly column

(Reaktion Books/Random House/Hamish Hamilton/Faber & Faber/Sceptre/Getty/iStock)

Obsessive fans are a curious phenomenon. I must admit that before reading Michael Bond’s Fans: A Journey into the Psychology of Belonging (Picador), I had not heard of “Bronies” – middle-aged men who meet in online communities to celebrate the characters in the My Little Pony toy franchise – and I was also left puzzling about the sort of person who would pay $25,000 for a kidney stone passed by William Shatner. In Fans, Bond looks with a shrewd eye over the subject of fandom through the lens of social psychology. It’s an enlightening read, and a hoot.

Bond also records that a Justin Timberlake devotee once paid £1,025 for a piece of French toast half-eaten by the bestselling pop star. Music fans looking for more vintage fare will enjoy Too Late to Stop Now: More Rock ’n’ Roll Stories by Allan Jones (Bloomsbury Caravel), which contains more than 40 interviews written by a journalist who started with Melody Maker in the early 1970s and went on to launch Uncut magazine.

The profiles include Elton John, Elvis Costello and Chrissie Hynde. There is also a revealing encounter with Sting, whom Jones first met in August 1977, when the singer had recently left the security of a full-time teaching job in a mining village called Cramlington to form The Police. After a hostile reception at a festival in France, a diffident, nervous Sting asked Jones, “Should I just give up?” Two years later, with Gold Discs hanging in his lavatory, success had worked its tantric magic. “I know I’m arrogant. I think it would be false for me to be modest,” Sting told Jones. “I’m a great singer and I know it. I’m a great songwriter and I know it.”