The best books you have probably never read

Rachel Cooke introduces her new weekly column in which she celebrates the gems, old and not so old, that slipped through the cracks

I enjoy reading book reviews almost as much as I like writing them, which is to say very much indeed, and don’t remotely subscribe to the view that they don’t shift copies. I can’t be the only person who often ends up buying a book solely because a critic made it sound unmissable. All the same, it has to be said that an awful lot of books do slip through the cracks.

The best non-fiction I’ve read so far this year is Helen Garner’s This House of Grief, a long and masterly account of the trial of an Australian man who drove his three small children off a bridge – and yet it was reviewed hardly at all. I stumbled on it only by chance in a bookshop. As for old books – and in our culture, writing becomes “old” almost overnight – they get written about very rarely. The best we can hope for, usually, is some middle-aged novelist with a hardback to plug explaining how reading Don DeLillo completely changed his life.

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