HAVING been a young child, like many others, who loved rooting though my own mother’s tin of hundreds of different mismatched buttons, I dived straight into Lynn Knight’s latest book The Button Box.

During WWII tiny French villages were used to help Jewish children escape the Holocaust. Caroline Moorehead, who discovered the little known story, spoke to Richard Fitzpatrick.

SARA is 28 and works in a bookshop in Sweden.

Peter Ackroyd is one of the most productive and elegant biographers writing in English today but is often accused of not uncovering anything new about his subjects. That doesn’t matter, he tells Tony Clayton-Lea

Like many of Lianke’s works, The Four Books is unavailable in his native China; unsurprising, given its subject is the murderous stupidity of the 1958-61 ‘Great Leap Forward’ — its massive, avoidable death toll still obfuscated by rulers.

A lost story by Irish writer Samuel Beckett will go on sale next month — 80 years after it was rejected by his publisher for being a “nightmare” read.

Mary Lawson

Black Sheep

THE INTERESTINGS

Between Friends

BOOKS make fantastic Christmas gifts, as once you have a fair idea of your recipient’s area of interest, it really shows that you’ve paid attention, that you genuinely care.

A Question Of Identity

The Beginner’s Goodbye

Jubilee Lines: 60 Poets For 60 Years

George Harrison Living In The Material World

The Uncoupling. Meg Wolitzer Chatto & Windus; £12.99

Rose Tremain