Secrets of a Suitcase
By Pauline Terreehorst (C Hurst & Co, £25, from 31 October)
Bidding on lot 0379 at Sotheby’s, essayist and museum director Pauline Terreehorst won a suitcase. The suitcase (Gucci, vintage) was, however, the least interesting thing about the lot. Packed into the suitcase was the postcard correspondence of Countess Margarethe Szapáry, an Austrian art collector and philanthropist who died in 1943. Mistress of the world she built for herself, yet subject to the changes sweeping through Europe, Margarethe emerges from Terreehorst’s account as a formidable figure of endurance.
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The Money Trap
By Alok Sama (Macmillan Business, £22)
This memoir by former Softbank president and CFO Alok Sama opens more like a thriller. The first thing his reader learns is that someone wants him out of the way. Desperately. So desperately that he has to say it twice. The real value for the reader comes from the fact that this is a true insider’s account of the workings of SoftBank. Sama provides a rich sense of the characters he encounters and cuts through to the gap between people and the image they project. The glimpses offered are frequently insightful and even more frequently funny.
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Shock Induction
By Chuck Palahniuk (Simon & Schuster, £6.99, from 8 October)
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Nearly 30 years on from Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s striking debut novel that inspired the David Fincher blockbuster film, the US author has penned another transgressive satire – this time about a billionaire-dominated technocracy. At a high school populated by precocious overachievers, disappearances of students are blamed on an apparent suicide – but the students have been tracked since birth by a technological platform, which has been priming them to be offered up at auction for a lifetime of servitude to the world’s richest people.
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After the Flood
By Alec Marsh (Sharpe Books, £20)
In the latest thriller in the Drabble and Harris series, author and Spear’s contributor Alec Marsh takes us to Istanbul in the late 1930s. As Europe is on the cusp of World War II, historian Ernest Drabble arrives with his wife Charlotte in the city for his honeymoon, along with his old friend Percival Harris.
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The trio’s idyllic trip quickly descends into chaos when Charlotte goes missing, as Drabble and Harris uncover a conspiracy involving the Nazis. Marsh says the novel reflects on Noah’s Ark and the creation story underpinning the ‘heart of Eurasian civilisation’.
