Disturbed lives
Salley Vickers applauds an acute and sobering account of the treatment of mentally ill women in Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present by Lisa Appignanesi
Maybe baby
Peggy Orenstein's Waiting For Daisy captures the pain of infertility, says Anushka Asthana
What’s up doc?
Max Pemberton's Trust Me, I'm a (Junior) Doctor jokingly reveals the reality of working in the NHS, says Katie Toms
A little of what you fancy …
... is the only sensible response to the craziness surrounding our diet. Kathryn Hughes puts Michael Pollan's In Defence of Food and Bee Wilson's Swindled on the menu
Duck tripe and chicken blood tortillas
Stefan Gates' In the Danger Zone and Chitrita Banerji's Eating India find it difficult to keep wider issues out of the kitchen, says Tom Jaine
When the only way is down
Sally Brampton's Shoot the Damn Dog is a lucid account of mental illness and attempted suicide
Joy of Sex gets makeover for generation that found Viagra
The Old favourites are still there: the 'Viennese oyster', 'pattes d'araignée' and the 'flanquette' all stand the test of time. But 35 years after Dr Alex Comfort introduced the world to these particular joys of sex, his seminal manual on how to pep up love lives is itself being spiced up to appeal to a 21st-century readership
Who are you calling mad?
Lisa Appignanesi's richly researched Mad, Bad and Sad asks why women are perceived as being more prone to mental illness than men, says Viv Groskop
Anatomy of melancholy
Darian Leader's The New Black and Sally Brampton's Shoot the Damn Dog suggest we have got depression all wrong, says Hilary Mantel
In remembrance
Giles Foden admires Memory, a collection of writing about memory, edited by Harriet Harvey Wood and AS Byatt