Books of the month: From Sebastian Faulks’ The Seventh Son to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud

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

The best of September’s book releases (The Independent)

The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 sent shockwaves around the world, although reactions clearly varied. In A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-1965 (Bloomsbury), the latest instalment of David Kynaston’s marvellous history of our isles, the contrasting micro and macro concerns are clear in an exchange between future comedy writer Laurence Marks and his father, after hearing the news on the radio in their Finsbury Park home. “My dad thinks the Soviets killed the President and there will be another world war,” Marks wrote in his diary. “I’m not worried about the war, I’m worried whether the Arsenal-Blackpool match will be called off tomorrow.” Life always goes on. The game was played. Arsenal won 5-3.

Kennedy’s successors include the odious Donald Trump, but I doubt Trump wants to imagine all those federal prosecutors as circling sharks. In Robert Peckham’s Fear: An Alternative History of the World (Profile Books) we are told that “adult film actress” Stormy Daniels, who claims she had an affair with the former US president, was struck by Trump’s “terror of sharks”. She said he used to watch Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, just to sit there and watch in “fascinated horror”.

If you want some fictional scares, then Helen Grant’s Jump Cut (Fledgling Press) is a chilling, highly atmospheric tale of 104-year-old Mary Arden, the last surviving cast member of a notorious lost film called “The Simulacrum”, who is holed up in a haunted Art Deco mansion.