Vuelta Skelter

Tim Moore
Jonathan Cape, £20, pp336

Twenty years on from Tim Moore’s first bike-based travelogue set amid professional cycling’s three grand tours, he completes his trilogy with a ride around the route of the 1941 Vuelta a España. He does so in fearsome heat, during a pandemic, and with the Spanish civil war a constant shadow; his bike is dedicated to Julián Berrendero, who won the 1941 race despite spending time in Franco’s concentration camps for expressing republican sympathies. Vuelta Skelter is more solitary and less eager to please than Moore’s previous adventures – but all the more thoughtful for it.

Anxious People

Fredrik Backman
Penguin, £8.99, pp416 (paperback)

Backman mixed the profound with the comically shambolic in 2014’s bestselling novel A Man Called Ove, and this endearing tale of an inept bank robbery turned hostage drama continues in the same vein. A cast of diverse characters work through their relationship issues and fears in a Swedish apartment that’s up for sale, while the smalltown police officers Google how to deal with a prisoner situation, making for a surefooted insight into the absurdity, beauty and ache of life.

What Strange Paradise

Omar El Akkad
Picador, £14.99, pp256

Amir, a nine-year-old Syrian boy, the only survivor from a boat of refugees, strikes up a friendship with a local teenage girl, Vänna, on the small island where he has washed up. Together, they navigate a world that offers them little except each other, the narrative alternating between Amir’s perilous journeys and life on the island he thought would provide refuge. El Akkad’s beautifully compassionate novel offers a sliver of hope amid the despair.

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