Lily: A Tale of Revenge

Rose Tremain
Chatto and Windus, £18.99, pp288

The enthralling heroine of Tremain’s 16th novel is orphan Lily Mortimer, abandoned as a baby in 1850 at the gates of a park. Taken to the London Foundling hospital, she experiences abuse and cruelty, leading her to commit an avenging crime years later. Tremain evokes Victorian London with visceral intensity in a gripping and deeply humane novel exploring themes of rejection, poverty, guilt and redemption.

On Getting Better

Adam Phillips
Penguin, £6.99, pp176 (paperback)

Earlier this year, the Freudian psychoanalyst and literary critic published On Wanting to Change, an extended essay on how psychotherapy – and the conversations it facilitates – can create potential for genuine change. On Getting Better, a companion volume, questions what we really mean when we talk about improving our internal lives and how it always begins in an idealised version of ourselves. Philips is an erudite and highly engaging writer: how, he asks, can we manage change when it “precipitates us into an unpredictable future?”

The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City

Matthew Beaumont
Verso, £9.99, pp336

In a series of intriguingly entitled essays, Beaumont investigates the literature and experience of city walking. We learn that Dickens wandered through the night in the aftermath of his father’s death to cure both his insomnia and grief, while the works of writers including HG Wells, GK Chesterton and Georges Bataille are analysed for their pedestrian adventures. There are scant few female writers featured – only Virginia Woolf is granted significant coverage – in an otherwise well-researched work of literary criticism.

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