Non-fiction highlights
The Suit: Form, Function and Style. Christopher Breward
From dandies and Sapeurs to the Zoot Suit and Le Smoking, this book celebrates 400 years of the history of menswear and the tailored suit.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés: Paris’s Rebel Quarter. John Baxter
Part of a series of great Parisian neighbourhoods, Saint-Germain-des-Prés is a narrative guidebook to this iconic quarter, renowned for nurturing all manner of rebels - revolutionaries, philosophers, bohemians, artists and jazz musicians.
I Know This To Be True. Geoff Blackwell
Truth, wisdom, beauty and other stuff that matters for sixty New Zealanders in the middle of interesting lives.
The Princess Diarist. Carrie Fisher
Carrie revisits the diaries she wrote while acting as Princess Leia in Star Wars, and reveals an affair with Harrison Ford. Published shortly before her untimely death, she writes with her characteristic wit and zest.
Walking the Himalayas. Levison Wood
Ex-paratrooper Wood undertakes a journey along the world's highest mountain chain, from Afghanistan to Bhutan, travelling through contested territories fraught with danger, and encountering peoples almost unknown to the modern West.
The Optician of Lampedusa. Emma Jane Kirby
BBC journalist Kirby has written a "parable of the awakening of one man's humanitarian conscience". The man, the only optician on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, relates a heart-wrenching eye-witness account of rescuing shipwrecked migrants, some saved while hundreds more drowned. Read an extract.