Books of the month: Waterloo Sunrise to Homesickness

In his monthly column, Martin Chilton reviews six of the best books from March

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Who doesn’t love Dolly Parton? As well as being a wonderful singer, songwriter and actor, she has created a remarkable legacy as a philanthropist for children’s literacy. Parton has now joined forces for a writing duet with bestselling author James Patterson. They have co-authored Run, Rose, Run (Century), a thriller about a young aspiring country music singer called AnnieLee Keyes. I really did want it to be good but, alas, it’s a pedestrian pot-boiler that features only flashes of the singer’s wit and which bears all the hallmarks of churn merchant Patterson. Parton remains in fine fettle in her nine-to-five job, however, as she demonstrates in the companion album to the book.

For fiction fans, happily, March is bursting with better new releases, especially historical ones. Among the novels I would recommend in this genre are James Runcie’s The Great Passion (Bloomsbury), set in Leipzig in 1727 and based around the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. Runcie, author of the Grantchester mysteries, has a gift for capturing the past. Karen Joy Fowler’s impressive epic Booth (Serpent’s Tail) is based around the six Booth siblings, one of whom went on to change the course of history by shooting Abraham Lincoln. Lucy Caldwell’s These Days (Faber) is an atmospheric tale set during the Belfast Blitz of 1941.

Now 80, Anne Tyler is still writing sharp chronicles of everyday domestic life, the subject of her 24th novel French Braid, which covers the Garrett family from 1959 up to pandemic times. As ever with Tyler, all of family life is there, from adultery to hip replacement. It is not on a par with her finest novels, such as Breathing Lessons, but there are moments to savor. If you are looking for something more modern, Daisy Buchanan’s Careering (Sphere) is a witty tale of the toxic world of modern work.