Perfumes: the Guide – a portal to a whole new art
Michelle Magorian scooped the 2008 Costa Children's Book Award with Just Henry, a huge 700-page book that made me cry. Not many authors can do that but Magorian handles dangerously emotional stuff and pulls it off without slipping into mawkish sentimentality. Hence tears.
The same quality marked out Goodnight Mister Tom, her first novel, which won the 1980 Guardian children's book prize and has been read by every child in year 6 and many others both younger and older – rightly so – ever since. Goodnight Mister Tom is avowedly weepy. Only the hardest heart could remain unmoved. I once met a child who'd sticky-taped three pages together because they made her cry too much – I'm sure everyone who's read the book will know which three.
In Goodnight Mister Tom, Magorian had the external drama of the second world war as an emotional backdrop: put simply, there was a lot to weep over. In Just Henry, however, the setting is 1949 and there should be – and is – a feeling of optimism and hope. It is a period that's rarely used in fiction but Just Henry reveals it to be one that's worth exploring. The effect of the war is still being felt in the social changes it brought about. Life didn't just "slip back": few families were lucky enough to remain unaffected. Fathers were lost or altered; mothers found themselves raising families alone, or having to return abruptly to a subordinate role; children were forced to make adjustments either way.
In her big, bold novel, knitted together with more mysteries and coincidences than are credible, Magorian wonderfully captures that uncertainty and shows children's ability to move forward and embrace change far faster than their parents or grandparents. Lest this realism and the solving of the mysteries is too mundane, Michelle adds an extra layer of emotion by weaving in the stories of film stars from the movies of the day. For once, the current fashion of long, long, long books is justified. Just Henry is a wallowing great read. Just don't forget your hanky.
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Charlotte Higgins: The Diary's favourite holiday-season pastime was smelling perfumes
Leona Lewis will soon join the ranks of Winston Churchill, Helen Keller and Gandhi by writing an autobiography. The chart-topping singer has signed a contract with publishers Hodder & Stoughton, with the aim to release the book in October.
Since winning the 2006 season of The X Factor, Lewis has broken sales records, serenaded Mandela and performed at the Beijing Olympics with Jimmy Page. The book will include over 100 new photographs, suggesting that pictures – and not meticulous prose - will be the means by which Lewis tells her tale.
"The last two years have been an unbelievable experience for me," she said in a statement. "So to have it documented in pictures and to be able to tell people in my own words how it feels means a lot to me." Dean Freeman, who worked on David Beckham's autobiography, has been hired to take new photographs of the 23-year-old – of Lewis hunched over a typewriter perhaps, or thumbing through the Oxford English Dictionary.
"This will be the first time Leona tells her story of how the X Factor launched her from waitressing in Pizza Hut in Hackney to stardom on both sides of the Atlantic," raved Fenella Bates, Lewis's editor at Hodder & Stoughton. "It is a real-life fairytale and every girl's dream."
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Charlotte Higgins: Bennett, Burnham and the Booker
The Diary's favourite holiday-season pastime was smelling perfumes, inspired by its favourite holiday-season book: the virtuosic Perfumes: the Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, which offers a critical analysis of 1,500 fragrances. Do not scoff: this is a branch of aesthetics as worthy as any other, and Turin and Sanchez's prose is a delight, with scents related to the orchestration of Ravel or to Bruckner symphonies.
In its haunting of London's perfumery halls, the Diary ran across novelist Philip Hensher, buying Margaret Thatcher's favourite scent Mitsouko, and Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait Gallery, who wears Creed's Bois du Portugal. Mitsouko is Turin's favourite perfume. However, he is scathing of Bois du Portugal: "Close in intent but not in richness or quality to de Nicolaï's divine New York, which is at once cheaper and vastly better."
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