In The Tango Singer (Bloomsbury) by Tomás El oy Martínez, translated by Anne McLean, Bruno Cadogan is a New York student undertaking research on the tango, and travels to Buenos Aires in the hope of meeting Julio Martel, an elusive tango musician with an extraordinary voice. It's diff erent, refreshing, and spot-on with its observations of the frustrations and rewards of long-inthe- tooth relationships, especially those between two people with very diff erent sets of needs and priorities. A very funny, quirky tale of a year-long trial separation, played out in the American Rockies and the Derbyshire Dales. I loved every minute of the 330- plus pages. I don't know who Sue Hepworth and Jane Linfoot are, or why they've written Plotting for Beginners (Snowbooks), 'a wry evaluation of long-haul marriages', together - but boy, does it work. His meticulous account of his family life, and the relationships between humans, animals, houses and landscapes, makes the reader feel very close to him and reveals the ingredients in the growth of the poet's mind. It is an elegiac account of his childhood in the shadow of the hunting accident his much-loved mother sustained when he was 16, and from which she never recovered. It is a measure of the author's achievement that the lengthy account of his public and private life elicits sympathy for the 'dandy with the machine gun'.Īndrew Motion introduced his memoir In the Blood (Faber) in Review in September. In the year of the 50th anniversary of the first production of Look Back in Anger, it was a great pleasure to read John Heilpern's masterly biography, John Osborne: A Patriot for Us (Chatto & Windus). It is desirably tactile and wonderfully translated from the original by Anthea Bell, and although some of the adventures may not be totally sympathetic to today's sense of political correctness, nobody will mind or notice, such is the richness of the stories and the delicate precision of the illustrations. The holiday anthology is the third in the series charting the life and times of a small French boy in the early 1960s. Nicholas on Holiday (Phaidon ), by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé, is a beautifully bound hardback collection of stories that you will want to have, to hold and to read out loud to children of all ages. If you aren't moved, explore your heart and check whether it has turned to stone. What it does do is off er an elegiac exploration of profound loss, adaptation and this thing called love.

A health warning: psychiatric care and therapy on the NHS bear absolutely no resemblance to the happenings in The Other Side of You (Fourth Estate) by Salley Vickers.

The Heart Has Reasons by Mark Klempner