Currey dishes up a work of genius

If you read one book this week

Tatiana, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster) R240

With Gorky Park, the 1981 crime novel that introduced Moscow detective Arkady Renko, Smith lifted a veil to reveal the inner workings of the Soviet police in the last years of the Brezhnev era. With Tatiana, some 30 years later, Renko is still at it; the Soviets may have long gone but Russia under Vladimir Putin seems as dysfunctional and corrupt as ever. This novel is based on the 2006 murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Here, the title character is a reporter who falls to her death from her sixth-floor flat in what is initially believed to be a suicide. What follows is a consistently brilliant and finely plotted roller-coaster ride through a very sleazy and murky world indeed.

The Issue

The first book in English to be printed in the New World is due to be auctioned in New York today by Sotheby's. The Whole Booke of Psalmes, printed in 1640, is expected to fetch between $15-million (over R150-million) and $30-million - which, as the New York Times put it, is "more than anyone, anywhere, has ever paid for a printed book".

That's a little out of my league but I am happy to report that my signed, limited-edition copy of Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls must be worth a small fortune. A quick search on AbeBooks.com revealed that signed copies of the UK first edition are trading at around $200.

Crash Course

Take 160 or so of the culture's greatest philosophers, writers, composers and artists and find out what makes them tick. That, in a nutshell, is Mason Currey's addictive and inspiring Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration and Get to Work (Picador). Entries range from those who would shame us with their workload - Anthony Trollope would dash off 3000 words each morning before starting his job at the post office, and William Faulkner once managed 10000 words in a single sitting - to those who should merely have been ashamed, like Toulouse Lautrec who did his best work at night, often in brothels.

Some were bone idle - Gertrude Stein wrote for just 30 minutes a day - whereas others literally worked to death. Taking a new job as tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes promptly contracted pneumonia and died. As routines go, VS Pritchett appeared to have it down to a fine art: breakfasts, crosswords, long baths, writing, napping and sipping on martinis.

The Bottom Line

"I was Clovis. I was Charlemagne. I was one mean son of a bitch . I was just a sewer rat with delusions of grandeur." - Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography by Mike Tyson with Larry Sloman (Blue Rider Press)