Signs of Life by Natalie Taylor is an autobiographical account of sixteen months of the authors life, starting on the day her husband Josh died, and ending on their sons first birthday. At the age of 24, Natalie suddenly found herself widowed and pregnant.

When I was offered the chance to read and review Signs of Life, my initial reaction was that Natalie’s story is similar to that of a former colleague who lost her partner shortly after their daughter’s birth. I remember the grief that struck the office at that time, and I felt drawn to Signs of Life, to find out just how someone could cope with such a tragedy.

Natalie’s account is based on what she wrote every day during this period.

Natalie Taylor

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To her fans and readers she’s Joyce Carol Oates, a highly respected writer with a bucket-load of writing awards and over 50 novels to her name. To others she’s Rosamund Smith or Lauren Kelly, two of her pen names. To students at Princeton University where she’s taught since 1978, she’s Professor Oates. To family and friends, she was Joyce Smith, loving wife of Raymond J Smith. In February 2008 when Ray died suddenly and unexpectedly of a hospital acquired infection, she took on her latest role and identity – that of ‘the Widow’. Her latest book is the entirely autobiographical and deeply personal ‘A Widow’s Story’ and it is Oates’ account of the aftermath of Ray’s death and its impact on her.

Joyce Carol Oates

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When I was around ten, my dad gave his battered old copy of If Only They Could Talk by James Herriot and told me I would love it. He was right. The tales of a vet’s life in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1930s were beautifully told, charming, hilarious and rather special. I went on to read all Herriot’s memoirs (James Herriot is a pseudonym), and truly loved the characters (human and animal) which he wrote about. Every so often I still take the (now very) battered paperbacks off my bookshelf and curl up on the sofa to lose myself in Herriot’s world.

So when I was offered the chance to read and review The Vet: My Wild and Wonderful Friends by Luke Gamble, billed as a 21st century James Herriot, I thought it was my lucky day.

Luke Gamble

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I’ve read very little travel writing on Australia, but then very little has grabbed my attention. We feel like we know Australia even if we haven’t been there ourselves; from Ramsey Street to the late Steve Irwin and the Australia Zoo we’re familiar with Aussie culture without having to spend twenty-four hours stuck on a plane to experience it. In his book “Ten Pound Pom”, however, Welshman Niall Griffiths turns all that on its head and makes sure that, in no uncertain terms, we learn the truth about what this faraway bastion of equality and opportunity is really like.

Back in 1976, Griffiths was, along with his family a “Ten Pound Pom”, emigrating to Brisbane under a scheme sponsored by the Australian government. Griffiths was nine at the time, twelve when the family returned to Liverpool.

Niall Griffiths

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Men are famously poor at dealing with growing older. The classic mid-life crisis usually involves a mistress or a Harley Davidson (possibly both) but in the case of Dominic Prince, it was a very different type of passion that kicked in. Standing on the scales on his 47th birthday, Prince could barely see past his belly but the truth was there – he was nearly 17 stone. He drank too much, ate FAR too much, smoked cigars and got out of breath if he took any exercise. Rather than join Weightwatchers or take up golf, Prince decided to he wanted to become a jockey because he had liked to ride when he was younger. It’s not the most obvious of things to want to do – it would be like me deciding I want to become a gymnast because I’d done a passable handstand in primary school.

Dominic Prince

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“My brother’s a poker player, but he isn’t a gambler, not really. That’s no thanks to Grandpa Sam. When we were little, Sam gave us a comprehensive education in blackjack, which he called pontoon. Here was the lesson: he was always the dealer and we always lost”. From such beginnings, Victoria Coren has ended up doing rather well out of cards. She has learnt to play well enough to join a professional poker team and collect career winnings of $1.5 million, and has become the first female European champion at the game; this book is the story of those wins and how she got there from being a shy, awkward and unhappy schoolgirl losing to her grandfather at blackjack. (Incidentally, my granddad also taught me to play pontoon when I was little, but lacking a slightly disreputable older sibling to later teach me the rules of poker, I have not become a millionaire player. Or a millionaire anything for that matter.

Victoria Coren

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Kenneth Williams kept a diary for more than forty years and in 1993, five years after his death, these diaries were published in an edited form. The diaries revealed a more complex figure than the comedian who became much loved through his Carry On roles and famous appearances on the chat show circuit. The private Kenneth Williams was a remarkably well read, religious man haunted by his homosexuality, his sometimes outrageous behaviour, and his thoughts of suicide. He lived an ascetic and often lonely life in a series of modest London flats and never seemed to have much money considering how famous he was. The diaries are 800 pages long (in my paperback copy) and include many interesting photographs from different points in Williams’ life, from his early revue days to the distinguished, grey haired figure of the late eighties shortly before his death.

Kenneth Williams

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Lorna Brunelle was just 33 when a routine medical exam alerted her to a problem in her neck which subsequent tests showed to be papillary thyroid cancer, the most common format of this relatively rare form of cancer. As a professional voice user (she’s a singer, acting coach and trainer) and a plus-sized model she was terrified that surgery on her neck might damage both her voice and her looks and hence her career. She kept records of her experience throughout her ‘journey’ with cancer and these were used to create her book ‘Dirty Bombshell – from Thyroid Cancer back to Fabulous’ which I have recently read on my Kindle after downloading a copy from Amazon for about £7.

cancer, Lorna J Brunelle

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In 1973 Carmen met Yeslam and all seemed right with the world. It was a carefree time when it seemed that to be young and in love was the peak of human joy. She was the daughter of a Persian mother and a Swiss father and had spent her childhood shuttling between the sterile safety of Switzerland and the unreal world of spoiled family visits to pre-Revolutionary Iran. Yeslam was just the handsome, intelligent, amusing, well-off guy with whom she fell in love. She never really thought about what it meant to be in love with a member of one of Saudi Arabia’s most powerful families at a time when only the Saudi Royal family carried more clout and influence than the family of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Laden.

Carmen Bin Ladin

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You could write down what I know about bowls on the back of a postage stamp and still have plenty of space left over. But I learned lots from Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll. I learned that Alex Marshall is a world famous bowls champ and that Alex Marsh the writer of this book isn’t.

It’s perhaps harder to put your finger on what Alex Marsh is though – second-rate village bowls team stalwart, amateur chicken fancier, builder of bookcases with Scooby Doo-style hidden chambers, and a man who thinks that claiming he’s on a sabbatical sounds better than being a house husband. And he’s a lousy house husband as his LTLP (now I assume that’s Long Term Life Partner though he never really explains it) keeps reminding him.

Alex Marsh

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“I found the lump twenty minutes before breakfast, three weeks after my marriage broke up,” Katherine Russell Rich’s book opens with a slap in the face. And it continues at that pace, slap after slap as the author unfolds her journey through an Inferno that she calls Cancerland. We meet doctors who hover on the brink of malpractice suits and who are unwilling to believe that any woman in her thirties could possibly have breast cancer. And there are co workers who avoid anyone who reminds them that they may one day die. And relatives who cannot mention the ‘c’ word. And friends who are as young as Russell Rich and therefore cannot deal with the reality of cancer.

Katherine Russell Rich

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