What the Dickens?

If you read one book this week

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty (Faber & Faber) R180

A compelling legal drama offering a razor-sharp dissection of lust, trust, predatory sex, risk-taking and responsibility. A noted scientist in her 50s, happily married for 30 years, has an encounter with a stranger in a broom closet in the House of Commons, and the dangerous relationship that follows eventually leads to murder. A gripping novel.

The Issue

Valentine's Day, then, and the quest for romance. While there is plenty of fiction - The Unpredictable Consequences of Love by Jill Mansell,Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, Take Me Home by Daniela Sacerdoti and Looking for Alaska by John Green currently seem to be pressing the right buttons - my money's on Michael Slater's absorbing The Great Charles Dickens Scandal (Yale University Press). Now issued in paperback, it is the first complete account of the novelist's alleged affair with actress Nelly Ternan.

I say "alleged" because it seems quite amazing that Dickens, certainly a well-known and public literary figure, was able to get away with something like this. Part of the reason he could pull it off, Slater suggests, was that the public didn't want to connect anything as squalid as adultery with such an all-round family guy. It's an intriguing story that should delight Dickens and detective fans alike.

Incidentally, the book's now an acclaimed movie, The Invisible Woman, with Ralph Fiennes. Camilla Long, the London Sunday Times' film critic, says the hot and steamy stuff between Dickens and Ternan is a bit on the repressed side - "they stand very close to each other and quiver". Well, hold me back.

Crash Course

And, it could be argued, just as Dickens was to Victorian London, so too was Armistead Maupin to gay San Francisco. Maupin was 30 when he began a newspaper column for the San Francisco Chronicle in August 1974 about the adventures of Mary Ann Singleton, an out-of-towner from Cleveland, Ohio, in the more sexually liberated Californian city. So began the Tales of the City chronicles, one of the most acclaimed series in contemporary light or comic fiction. Arguably, Sex and the City and the Bridget Jones Diaries more or less followed the same template.

Now, almost 40 years later, Maupin has decided to end the nine-volume series with The Days of Anna Madrigal. The title character, Maupin fans will tell you, was the owner of the wacky boarding house that became Singleton's new home in the first novel. Madrigal is now in her 90s, and the novel culminates with a road trip to the 2014 Burning Man Festival in California's Black Rock Desert.

The Bottom Line

"I am confident there is no such thing as normal." - Sex After: Women Share How Intimacy Changes as Life Changes by Iris Krasnow (Gotham Books)