Books of the month: From You Are Here by David Nicholls to James by Percival Everett

A new page-turner from ‘One Day’ author David Nicholls, Andrew O’Hagan’s majestic new state-of-the-nation novel, and Percival Everett’s spin on Mark Twain’s 1884 novel ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ – Martin Chilton picks the best reads for this month

April’s best books include John Connell’s ‘Twelve Sheep: Life Lessons from a Lambing Season’ (Allen & Unwin/Faber/Fig Tree/Hodder & Stoughton/iStock/Pan Macmillan/Simon & Schuster)

After taking a stroll near Lewes in Sussex in 1932, Virginia Woolf wrote a striking phrase in her diary: “I want to walk, alone, and come to terms with my own head.” The quote appears as the epigraph to Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehmann (Allen Lane). It is a delightful read, enhanced by quirky photographs – including several of these visionary writers with their goats.

When Boris Johnson praised the “vaccine success” he attributed it to “greed, my friends”. His quotation is used by Angus Hanton in the chapter “The NHS Cash Cow” in Vassal State: How America Runs Britain (Swift), a depressing read about how US companies have siphoned profits from Britain. Hanton, a public policy expert, details how a £500m pandemic stockpile of PPE, bought from American companies, was poorly maintained and in a shoddy condition. Hanton’s conclusion is that, when it comes to expensive US private providers, “greed did not deliver success for Britain. It cost us dearly.”

Social historian Sarah Wise has written an important, shocking book in The Undesirables: The Law That Locked Away a Generation (Oneworld). It is estimated that 50,000 Britons were incarcerated as “defectives” under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Wise’s “Appendix 2: Anecdotes of Women Detained for Having a Child Out of Wedlock” is one of the bleakest I’ve read for a long time. It includes numerous accounts of women being locked up for decades in asylums and heavily sedated, just for giving birth. Wise throws light on a shameful national scandal.