Books of the month: From Donal Ryan’s The Queen of Dirt Island to Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House

Martin Chilton reviews six of August’s biggest new books for our monthly column

This month’s picks include ‘The Night Ship’ by Jess Kidd and Philip Parker’s ‘Small Island’ (Getty/iStock)

The music business is full of the ghastliest people,” insists Richard Fairbrass, who, along with brother Fred, gained worldwide fame with the catchy 1991 hit “I’m Too Sexy”. Their unusual memoir Still Too Sexy: Surviving Right Said Fred (Omnibus Press) is a 230-page joint interview, edited by Joel McIver, and it is salacious, candid, funny and shocking. The book captures the anarchy of sudden celebrity. It seems that one of the many dubious perks of fame is being sent a weird video of a fan having his scrotum nailed to a wooden bench. Among the entertaining stories that the siblings swap are those about stomach liposuction, making the Queen giggle, blowing a chance to be in Die Hard 2, and Ned Sherrin’s predatory behaviour. Of the ‘suck and f***’ swingers’ parties for celebrities to which they were invited, Fred remarks drolly that “it was very Eyes Wide Shut”. One anecdote proved too risky to tell in full, though. It was the time they saw “a supposedly straight male pop star sucking off a well-known footballer” when the lift doors of a luxury hotel in Birmingham suddenly opened. “If we revealed who either of them were, we’d get killed,” says Fred.

Right Said Fred’s tell-all autobiography is just one delight among a tasty smorgasbord of non-fiction out in August. In Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir (Souvenir Press), best-selling author Julia Cameron deals, in part, with her failed marriage to director Martin Scorsese, during the Taxi Driver era. “Coked up and drunk, I was a handful,” admits Cameron. She spent a lot of time in Malibu with musicians and their partners, when her husband was making The Last Waltz with Robbie Robertson and The Band. Life there gave her “a comforting feeling of normalcy”, she notes, deadpan, because “drug habits were common among rock-and-roll wives”.

Tempestuous marriages come into Norwegian anthropologist Erika Fatland’s enchanting book High: A Journey Across the Himalayas Through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China (Maclehose Press, translated by Kari Dickson). Fatland spent eight months in the Himalayas researching her book where she talked to a Mosuo woman about the loose arrangements of “walking marriages” – relationships that amount to little more than a man visiting his wife at night and leaving early the next morning. “It’s very easy to get divorced,” Sadama tells the author: “He can either stop coming or she can lock the door”. Incidentally, Fatland also chatted to some old men who claim to have seen yetis. It appears they are twice the size of yaks and really do have hairy feet and hands.