IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan (Canongate), R125

A VEIL of melancholy has fallen over Jacob Marlowe, jaded lycanthrope with an unspeakable and lustful appetite, and he contemplates suicide.

Luckily he soon regains a taste for life, as it were, and initial fears the novel will collapse under its existential baggage are thankfully dispelled as this perverse and funny collision between genre and literary fiction begins to, er, bite and run amok with your imagination. Not for the faint of heart.

THE ISSUE

FROM one horror to the next: former anti-apartheid campaigner and Labour MP Peter Hain's memoirs, Outside In (Biteback), will soon be in the bookstores.

In it, he recounts his Pretoria childhood, his family's departure for the UK, his activism there and his political career.

Hain's book has been blurbed: "Far from the bloated memoirs of a former government insider, this is the story of a courageous, campaigning life that is intrinsically bound up with the destiny of South Africa."

Which is what they would say, of course. The London Sunday Times carried an extract at the weekend, and it reeked of grandstanding and moral triumphalism. The paper carried a live, online session in which Hain took questions.

An example: "Someone said to me recently how hard it is to be white in South Africa these days. What do you think of that?"

"From where South Africa was before Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, it is an amazing new place, the evil of apartheid gone and a new rainbow democracy, saving white South Africans from civil war.

"Yes, it's tougher than it was for whites who enjoyed a privileged life at the expense of black citizens, but it's still good."

CRASH COURSE

THE workplace is a vale of tears. And it's even worse for women, who, we're constantly reminded, do less well and earn less than men. Help is at hand: Mrs Moneypenny's Careers Advice for Ambitious Women (Viking).

A highly regarded columnist with the Financial Times, Mrs Moneypenny does exactly what it says on the box - with dollops of humour. Refreshingly, blondeness and thinness don't come into it at all (although women will forever be judged by their appearances).

Neither does behaving like Margaret Thatcher. As Mrs Moneypenny puts it: "Be careful whose heads you tread on on your way to the top because they will be attached to the backsides you need to kiss on your way back down."

THE BOTTOM LINE

"AFTER Charles Manson, people could look back at The End, Strange Days, People Are Strange and The End Of The Night and hear what Manson had done as if it had yet to happen." - The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, by Greil Marcus (Faber and Faber)