All the ingredients for a good summer read

1:12pm Thursday 21st August 2008

THREE very different books by three Herefordshire authors offer an interesting choice of summer reading.

Simon Mundy has written about a world he knows intimately in his second novel, Silent Movements, published by Hay Press.

Set in the last years of the Soviet regime, the novel brings together the personal costs of the Cold War in Europe and the life of young musicians in the 1980s.

Elena Rudienko, a composer from Kiev, is being persecuted to get at her love, the celebrated violinist Alexander Kryzhinski. When he decides to defect, the tensions of Cold War Europe begin to intrude on the world of classical music and other people are drawn into the intrigue with desperate consequences.

“Simon Mundy really knows the point where music, politics and history collide,” wrote Julian Lloyd Webber. “He also understands the processes of a performer’s life.”

The author’s understanding of the musical world comes from his job as young musicians’ reviewer and correspondent of The Times and Classical Music Magazine during the period he writes about in Silent Movements. As well as two novels (the first, Seeking the Spoils, was published by Hay Press in 2006), he has published three books of poems as well as biographies of Elgar, Bernard Haitink, Glazunov, Purcell and Tchaikovsky.

Silent Movements is published by Hay Press, £7.99 In News of the World? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings, Ludlow-based Peter Burden examines the News of the World’s activities, including the fake sheikh and illegal phone tapping, which led to a jail sentence for royal reporter Clive Goodman and the resignation of the editor.

He asks whether the tabloids’ protestations of public interest are justified, of simply a self-serving way to halt declining circulations.

This is a book for anyone who’s ever questioned the assertion that a story is “in the public interest” and anyone concerned with the individual’s right to privacy.

Peter Burden has had a varied career, having been a fashion king, writer of radio jingles and the owner of a non-winning racehorse, with his first best-selling novel, Rags, based on his adventures in the rag trade. Since then, he has used his knowledge of the horse-racing world to work with John Francome and trainer Jenny Pitman on their fiction.

News of the World? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings is published by Eye Books, £12.99 In Macduff’s Hat – and Other Shakespeare Enigmas, Chris Nash, a retired teacher of English literature with a bee in his bonnet about Shakespeare, asks some intriguing questions about the Bard’s work.

“Is King Lear really unhinged from the start, or was there method in the madness of his scheme to hand over the kingdom to his daughters?” he asks.

“And when Malcolm tells Macduff not to put his hat upon his brows, is he speaking literally or figuratively?”

Chris, who lives in Leominster, offers original and inventive answers to a number of Shakespearean conundrums, which may well lead people to revisit the plays with new insight.

Macduff’s Hat – and other Shakespeare Enigmas is published by Trafford Publishing, £5.99.