These They Have Loved Finest Crime, Alternative Bookers, Dazzling Poets, Science and History - Writers and Critics Choose Their Favourites

Beginning of article

ELSPETH BARKER

In Heshel's Kingdom (Hamish Hamilton pounds 15.99), Dan Jacobson describes a visit to Lithuania in search of the grave of Heshel, his grandfather; in search, too, of some sense of the country which his mother left for South Africa before the Nazi massacres. Sombre, beautiful, funny and very angry. Barbara Trapido's The Travelling Hornplayer (Hamish Hamilton pounds 15.99) is her most marvellous yet, fearlessly acrobatic, tragic and comic. It offers the huge pleasures and pains of old friends, families and foes from her earlier books: how some have grown, and who would have guessed what happened to so- and-so. Ethel & Ernest (Cape pounds 14.99) celebrates …