Books of the month: From Long Island by Colm Tóibín to The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

Martin Chilton reviews the biggest books for May

Our guide to what to read this May (Batsford Books/iStock/Jonathan Cape/Peninsula Press Ltd/Picador/Reynaldo Rivera/Robin Christian/Sceptre/W&N)

Tiffany Murray’s mum Joan, who was the chef at the famous Rockfield recording studios in Wales, cooked for some of the biggest music stars of the 1970s. There were no life-on-Mars bars for David Bowie, though, who was very frugal. “David Bowie hardly ate. If you asked him, he’d say, ‘a little bit, please’. Very polite. He drank milk. Always smoking,” Joan recalled.

Snapshot memories of other famous musicians who used the studios – including Dave Edmunds, Rush, Hawkwind – fill Murray’s delightful childhood memoir My Family and Other Rock Stars. It’s full of anecdotes to make you smile. My favourites were Freddie Mercury and his Queen bandmates playing rounders in the quadrant, Simple Minds (appropriately named) having food fights, and Lemmy, away from his Hells Angels pals, wanting the crusts cut off his bacon sandwiches.

The word “miserable” appears 30 times in The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Penguin Classics) and although it’s hardly a surprise that the Prague-born author of The Trial was woebegone, it is a comfort that he kept some of his maudlin entries succinct. The diaries cover 1909 to 1923 and the one for Sunday 19 June 1910 simply records: “Slept, woke up, slept, woke up, miserable life.” Ross Benjamin’s new translation of the complete, uncensored diaries reveals a deeply idiosyncratic writer who felt forsaken for much of his life.