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Byline: Thomas Marks The Memory Palace: a Book of Lost Interiors by Edward Hollis 350PP, PORTOBELLO BOOKS, T £23 (PLUS £1.35 P&P) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £25, EBOOK £14.62)*** In [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica by TJ Clark 352PP, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, T £25.95 (PLUS £1.35 P&P) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £29.95) **** Picasso has [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks How to Read a Graveyard by Peter Stanford 288PP, BLOOMSBURY, T £12.99 (PLUS £1.35 P&P) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £14.99) It might make one in love with [...]

Byline: by Rowan Moore and Thomas Marks Why We Build by Rowan Moore 304PP, PICADOR, £18 (PLUS £1.35 P&P) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £20, EBOOK £11.64) ***** In 'Builders of [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks The Server by Tim Parks 288PP, HARVILL SECKER T £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £16.99, EBOOK £15.21) *** A Buddhist retreat hardly sounds like [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks 'What's become of Waring?', one of Robert Browning's best–known poems asks of a writer who's given his friends the slip. 'What's become of Browning?' we might equally [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks This Is Paradise by Will Eaves 304PP, PICADOR T £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £16.99, EBOOK £8.05) **** Fiction lets us peer at other [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks Open City by Teju Cole 400PP, HAMISH HAMILTON, £12.99 T £11.99 (PLUS £1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 **** 'And so when I began to go on evening [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks The Red Sweet Wine of Youth: the Brave and Brief Lives of the War Poets by Nicholas Murray 352PP, LITTLE, BROWN, £25 T£23 (PLUS £1.25 P&P) 0844 [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks Caribou Island by David Vann 304PP, PENGUIN, £8.99 T£8.99 (PLUS 99P P&P) 0844 871 1515 ***** Caribou Island is David Vann's first full-length novel, but in many [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones 320PP, JOHN MURRAY, £14.99T£12.99 (PLUS £1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 **** Characters migrate.' 'C That tag from Umberto Eco, which [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks Screwtop Thompson by Magnus Mills 128PP, BLOOMSBURY, £10 T £10 (PLUS £1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 **** It is little wonder that the talent of Magnus Mills [...]

Byline: Thomas Marks Then Came the Evening by Brian Hart 272PP, BLOOMSBURY, £11.99 T£10.99 (PLUS £1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 *** Brian Hart's promising first novel starts with a mysterious [...]

The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by M Glenn Taylor 311PP, BLUE DOOR, pounds 12.99 T pounds 10.99 (PLUS pounds 1.25 P&P) 0844 871 1515 **** A novel that describes itself [...]

Pilgrims: a Lake Wobegon Romance by Garrison Keillor 304PP, FABER & FABER, pounds 16.99 T pounds 14.99 (PLUS pounds 1.25 P& P) 0844 871 1515 **** If the majority of [...]

All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney 336PP, FABER & FABER, pounds 12.99 (PBK) T pounds 11.99 (PLUS pounds 1.25 P& P) 0844 871 1515 *** When the [...]

Our Story Begins by Tobias Wolff Bloomsbury, pounds 9.99 Our Story Begins combines 21 of Tobias Wolff's previously published stories, with 10 new works. At his best, Wolff is a [...]

Vermeer's Hat by Timothy Brook Profile, pounds 9.99 Vermeer painted interiors so calm and delicate that you could be forgiven for imagining that 17th-century Delft was a world unto itself. [...]

The Seven Lives of John Murray by Humphrey Carpenter John Murray, pounds 12.99 By the time John Murray VII sold the family firm in 2002, Murray had long been considered [...]

'One of the reasons for learning at least one foreign language well,'' T S Eliot once wrote, 'is that we acquire a kind of supplementary personality.'' It's a good way [...]

Elizabeth in the Garden by Trea Martyn Faber & Faber, pounds 9.99 Garden parties aren't what they used to be. Elizabethan courtiers were more likely to bankrupt themselves impressing the [...]

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami tr by Philip Gabriel Harvill Secker, pounds 8.99 The bestselling novelist Haruki Murakami is no Sunday jogger. For [...]

A Quiet Adjustment by Benjamin Markovits Faber & Faber, pounds 7.99 The second instalment of Benjamin Markovits's Byron trilogy sees the wild poet set loose in a domestic novel. Nineteen-year-old [...]

Ogee, squinch, corbel, mullion, ball-flower. To the uninitiated, architectural language can sound like a mysterious code. Joe Gargery stumbles on the right word for it in Great Expectations: 'architectooralooral''. Architecture [...]

Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare Vintage, pounds 7.99 When people describe a landscape as 'empty'', they usually aren't looking at it carefully enough. In Secrets of the Sea, [...]

A Little History of the English Country Church by Roy Strong Vintage, pounds 9.99 For Philip Larkin, the English parish church was a 'special shell''. He recognised that the local [...]

The Plot Against Pepys by James Long and Ben Long Faber & Faber, pounds 9.99 Civil servants today are prone to worry about job cuts, but in the 17th century [...]

Being Shelley by Ann Wroe Vintage, pounds 9.99 Byron thought Shelley 'the least worldly minded person'' he had ever known. He was a dreamer who continually reimagined himself and the [...]

Universe of Stone: Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind by Philip Ball 322pp, Bodley Head, pounds 20 T pounds 18 (plus pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4112 [...]

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks Vintage, pounds 7.99 Although it avoids the nostalgia of Birdsong or Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks's Engleby remains a historical novel, as it recasts the last 40 [...]

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tr by Simon Armitage Faber & Faber, pounds 7.99 English students have been struggling with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for generations. Simon [...]

142 Strand by Rosemary Ashton Vintage, pounds 9.99 Most Victorians carefully distinguished work from home, and lived their private lives behind closed doors. But at 142 Strand, home to John [...]

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee Vintage, pounds 10.99 Hermione Lee concludes this magnificent biography with a visit to Edith Wharton's grave in Versailles, where she is moved to clear away [...]

The King's Glass: a Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art by Carola Hicks 246pp, Chatto & Windus, pounds 18.99 T pounds 16.99 (plus pounds 1.25 p&p) 0870 428 4112 [...]

Look We Have Coming to Dover! by Daljit Nagra Faber & Faber, pounds 6.99 Daljit Nagra's debut collection offers insights into the lives of British-born Indians that are poignant and [...]

Imposture by Benjamin Markovits Faber & Faber, pounds 7.99 Wherever Byron went, people wanted to follow. Imposture imagines a story in which one of his 'inky tribe'' starts to imitate [...]

Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin Penguin, pounds 8.99 Thomas Hardy lived in a 'partly real, partly dream country'' as he moved between the bright lights of society and the dark [...]