Books in brief

Djibouti by Elmore Leonard (Orion, £7.99) The Somali pirate novel has almost become a genre of itself in 2011 with, at the last count, six books being published on this theme by authors such as Wilbur Smith, Stella Rimington, and Elmore Leonard, king of the Detroit crime caper, whose latest is about a documentary film-maker looking for a challenge. An interesting change of locale for Leonard, and a thrilling novel. The Baskerville Legacy by John OʼConnell (Short Books, £9.99) This short but engrossing fable is a fictional account of the collaboration between Arthur Conan Doyle and Bertram Robinson which led to The Hound of the Baskervilles. O’Connell’s book is an eerie, pitch-perfect gothic tale, but it is also more than just a piece of literary archeology, probing questions of authorial ownership and fate and language in an atmospheric tour de force. Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (Jonathan Cape, £12.99) Palahniuk’s new novel is a funny, graphic and surprisingly moral fable about Hell. Madison is 13 and dead. She’s our Dante in the underworld. But Madison likes it in Hell: it’s a lot better than the life she lived on earth as a latchkey kid of Leftier-than-though film stars. A barely veiled screed on secular humanism and its arrogance, Palahniuk’s Damned is not for the faint of heart.
You Cannot Be Serious by Matthew Norman (Fourth Estate, £8.99) The Telegraph’s witty and erudite Matthew Norman chronicles a century of things that annoy the sports fan, from Wimbledon’s centre court crowd to the England football team. Even Hitler gets a mention, for banning cricket on the grounds that it was “insufficiently violent for German fascists” – though he’s well behind Andy Gray, John Terry and Tim Henman. Lost Diaries by Craig Brown (Fourth Estate, £9.99) Britain’s leading satirist, Craig Brown, is a national jewel, poking fun at pomposity and pricking the great and the good, and of course, the not so good.
His Private Eye diary in particular has added huge gaiety to the nation. Here in this volume he brings together excerpts featuring Harold Pinter, John Prescott, Keith Richards, Jordan, Alan Clark and Martin Amis. The Lost Empire of Atlantis by Gavin Menzies (Orion, £20) Gavin Menzies, the historian known for controversial revisionist theses, returns with a new book that, surprisingly, isn’t about how the Chinese were the first on the moon. In this book he makes the quite reasonable claim that Atlantis was a lost Minoan empire with ports based in Crete and Thera. Using DNA evidence, he brings to life Atlantis as it may (or may not) have been.