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THE REINVENTION OF IVY BROWN
By Roberta Taylor
(Atlantic Books, Hardback £14.99)
It's 1963 and London is experiencing one of the coldest winters it can remember. Ivy Brown sits in her typists' pool at the Wiseman Pulverising Company, shivering at the thought of the cold outside, but much more at the prospect of turning 30. Her new Beaver Lamb coat, and two men called Arthur and Brian, are the only warm spots in her life, except that both men offer her their affection at a price. Brian's job is to provide a form of grappled instant satisfaction; Arthur's role is more complex. Criss-crossing London in pursuit of the real story behind Arthur's carefully constructed facade, Ivy finds herself at the Tate Gallery, where she encounters the outrageous Pandora and tumbles headlong into her decadent Sapphic west London world. Written with a tangible feel for the rigid conventions and class divisions of the times, Roberta Taylor writes with the veracity of a Londoner born and bred, and with the additional insight her much-loved part as Irene Raymond in EastEnders has offered her.

FOR ALL THE TEA IN CHINA: Espionage Empire and the Secret Formula for the World's Favourite Drink
By Sarah Rose
(Hutchinson, Hardback £18.99)
In 1845 Robert Fortune lay dying on a Chinese junk in Fuzhou, a situation made more critical by the imminent arrival of a group of pirates. Rousing himself, he adopted the subterfuge of dressing all the Chinese crew members as British soldiers and standing on deck to ward off the intruders - a strategy that worked. He subsequently turned his adventure and the story of his discovery of Chinese plants beloved of Victorian England (Bleeding Heart, Chinese Fan Palm) into a best-selling book. This brought him to the attention of the East India Company, who conceived the idea of sending him to China to steal both the ancient methods of tea-growing and the plants themselves to break the tea cartel that had the country locking up their expensive tea in chests. This he managed with great success, whilst putting himself in great personal danger - it was effectively industrial (or at least horticultural) espionage. But it certainly broke the tea cartel and brought tea-drinking, for both the rich and the poor, to its central place in British life today.

ECLIPSE: The Story of the Rogue, the Madam and the Horse that Changed History By Nicholas Clee
(Bantam Press, Hardback £20)
Eclipse is arguably the most important racehorse of all time. He won practically every race he was ever entered for, sired 344 sons and daughters who were also winners, and his bloodline continues to this day. Bred in the eighteenth century by the Duke of Clarence's stable, Eclipse got off to a suitably royal start in life, so how is it that he became the property of an Irish ne'r-do-well called Dennis 'Count' O'Kelly, whose major talents were guile, a skill at betting and, clearly, a perfect eye for livestock. Investing his considerable winnings in buying half a leg to start with, he was repaid in spades, which allowed him to fraternize with the great and the good of the aristocracy and even the Prince Regent - though he was only accepted in part, not least because his chosen companion was the Madam of the finest brothel in town. When Eclipse finally died, he was found to have a massive 14lb heart that literally allowed him to 'run the distance'. O'Kelly, too, kept going, never fully accepted, but rich enough to buy the Duke of Chandos's house, Cannons, now home to North London Collegiate School.

SADOMASOCHISM FOR ACCOUNTANTS
By Rosy Barnes
(Marion Boyars Publishers, Paperback £8.99)
Paula is 38-years-old and in love with Alan, who is an accountant. The temerity of Alan going off with a younger model called Belinda takes some beating, especially since Paula is not nearly as dull as she looks and Alan, well, is. Paula's solution is not what you'd call conventional - a surprise naked appearance at Alan and Belinda's flat. When that doesn't work, she seeks the next most obvious solution and enrols in the local sadomasochism club, Liscious. It soon becomes clear to Paula that the lessons to be learned there are not only of the sexual kind. Alan, meanwhile, is beginning to understand quite how high maintenance it is to look as good as Belinda, and the sort of price he might have to pay - a little bit of a nip and a tuck, for example - might not produce the longed-for sexual frisson he'd had in mind. This has to be the most unlikely romantic comedy (because that's what it is) ever, but why does that have to be a bad thing?

YOU ARE HERE
By Christopher Potter
(Hutchinson, Hardback £20)
I expect you can remember writing your address on your schoolbooks as 'The World, The Solar System, The Galaxy', bristling with pride at a scientific knowledge beyond your years. I expect you can also remember staring up at the sky at night wondering what's out there and what our place in it all is. That, for most of us, is as far as we get, apart from a half-hearted attempt to read Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time. Now is the time to make amends by reading Christopher Potter's immensely enjoyable, accessible and enlightening explanation of 13.7 billion years of history, in which he makes some sense of how simple matter became human and how the very planets themselves evolved. We may never know with absolute certainty what we are and why we are here, but one thing's for sure: you'll feel a whole lot cleverer once you've read this entertaining and informed labour of love from a man who draws on his wealth of literary and intellectual experience to illuminate a lifelong interest in trying to understand where nature and science collide.

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