Byline: by Max Davidson
A Man Of Parts
by David Lodge Harvill Secker [pounds sterling]18.99 [pounds sterling]15.99 inc p&p
*****
David Lodge's career has been stop-start since the glorious campus novels of the Seventies and Eighties, but this is his best book in years: sprawling, funny, touching, a near-perfect fusion of story and scholarship. The man of parts is H.G. Wells: not just a giant of science fiction but also a champion of socialism and, in his private life, one of the great literary goats of the 20th Century. Lodge imagines Wells in his twilight years during the Second World War, and in a beautifully crafted narrative, resurrects a giddy, hedonistic, ideas-driven life.
Lucky Break
by Esther Freud Bloomsbury [pounds sterling]11.99 [pounds sterling]11.49 inc p&p
***
'Young people who drift towards the acting profession do so because they're useless at anything else.' There is no kidglove treatment for students enrolling at Lucky Break's London drama school: they can expect a bruising induction into a cruelly competitive vocation. Ex-drama student Esther Freud writes with humour and insight about insecure young actors courting failure and humiliation as they reach for the stars. But it is a shame she shifts from gritty realism into escapist fantasy with a cornball climax at a Royal film premiere.
The Spoiler
by Annalena McAfee Harvill Secker [pounds sterling]12.99 [pounds sterling]12.49 inc p&p
*****
Novels about journalists by journalists can be selfindulgent, but not Annalena McAfee's brilliant debut. Set in 1997, it grips from the first with verbal polish and razor-sharp satire: each new character is more deliciously absurd than the last. But if there is some terrific knockabout comedy in The Spoiler, it is also a subtle, character-driven novel, counterpointing Honor Tait, ageing doyenne of Fleet Street, and Tamara Sim, a twentysomething hackette high on the tawdry excitements of the internet age.
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