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John
by Cynthia Lennon Hodder & Stoughton. Pages 404. £ 8.15

Cynthia Lennon is one of the closest surviving witnesses of events that have passed into music legend. She met John Lennon when they were both at art college, and their relationship, coinciding with the start of the Beatles phenomenon, spanned ten of the most important Beatles year.

For the first time Cynthia presents not just new and fascinating insights into those legendary times, but also tells her full and compelling personal story of marriage to a man who was to become the most idolized and admired of all the Beatles. Since John’s assassination in New York in 1980, Cynthia has retained her silence about many of the subsequent events. Now she tells her side of the story and is candid about the cruel, as well as the loving, side of the John she knew. She tells of the breakdown of their marriage and the beginning of his relationship with Yoko Ono in more detail than has been ever disclosed before, and reveals the many difficulties estrangement from John—and then his death— brought for herself and their son Julian. The book has an amazing repertoire of never-seen before pictures from Lennon and Cynthia’s collection. Cynthia is a remarkable survivor and this is an extraordinary story about the man she never stopped loving.

The Big Over Easy
by Jasper FForde Hodder & Stoughton Pages 398. £ 12.99

It’s Easter in Reading—and a bad time for eggs—and no one can remember the last sunny day. Ovoid D-class nursery celebrity Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty III, minor baronet, ex-convict and millionaire philanthropist is found shattered to death beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. Evidence points to his ex-wife who has met with an accident down at the Yummy-Time biscuit factory.

But detective Inspector Jack spratt and his assistant Mary Mary remain unconvinced, a sentiment not shared by their superiors at the reading Police Department, who are still smarting over their failure to convict the Three Pigs of murdering Mr. Wolff. Before long Jack and Mary find themselves grappling with a sinister plot involving cross-border money laundering, bullion smuggling, problems with beanstalks and titans seeking asylum.

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