Peggy: A Novel

Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison
John Murray, £18.99, pp384

A decade in the works, Rebecca Godfrey’s vivacious fictionalised biography of Peggy Guggenheim remained unfinished when she died, too young, in 2022. Her friend and fellow author Leslie Jamison has gone on to complete it, enabling the heiress and arts patron to narrate a full life of adventure and purposeful rebellion against sexism and antisemitism. The result is a narrative rich in self-awareness, shifting enticingly from New York to London and Paris, with cameos by famous friends and lovers including Man Ray, Emma Goldman and Samuel Beckett.

Oaklore: Adventures in a World of Extraordinary Trees

Jules Acton
Greystone Books, £18.99, pp272

Constructed around a series of nature rambles, Acton’s aptly eclectic book chronicles time spent getting better acquainted with the UK’s oak trees and the vast web of life they support, from woodpeckers and purple hairstreak butterflies to lichens and fungi, as well as mystical beings and the likes of William Shakespeare, whose plays were written in oak gall ink. If the research-based passages can feel a bit teacherly, the joyful verve with which Acton imparts wisdom gathered in the wild is impossible to resist.

My Men

Victoria Kielland (translated by Damion Searls)
Pushkin Press, £9.99, pp208 (paperback)

Although based on the life of America’s first female serial killer, this short Nordic novel is less true crime, and more a memorably unsettling study in literary interiority. When we first encounter her, Belle Gunness is still Brynhild Størset, a 17-year-old maid in Norway, relishing seduction by her employer’s son. But after he violently rejects her and causes a miscarriage, she emigrates to Chicago and begins wooing victims through lonely hearts ads. The grisly subject matter is paired with intensely expressionist prose, favouring radical feeling over psychological acuity.

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