Books of the month: From Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You to Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks

Martin Chilton reviews six of September’s biggest releases for our monthly column

The success of ‘Normal People’ and ‘Conversations with Friends’ has made Sally Rooney’s ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ one of the year’s most hotly anticipated releases (Faber/Getty)

Perhaps it’s the book nerd in me, but I do enjoy a good index. And they seem to be getting rarer. In Dennis Duncan’s Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure (Allen Lane) we learn that famous “literary indexers” include Virginia Woolf, Alexander Pope and Vladimir Nabokov. Surprise, surprise, Duncan also tells us that indexers have historically been “overwhelmingly women… for the most part, anonymous, their work uncredited”.

Simone de Beauvoir’s “lost novel”, The Inseparables (Vintage, translated by Lauren Elkin), returns to one of her pet subjects – the story of her inseparable childhood friendship with the tragic Zaza (Andrée in this story). The book, tame to 21st-century eyes, was considered “too intimate” to be published in 1954. The novel also reflects de Beauvoir’s rejection of religion. In one telling moment, her character Sylvie mocks the “blather” of the “gossipy old” priest. “I fled the chapel without doing my penitence. I was more shaken than that day on the metro when a man had spread open his overcoat to reveal something pink.”

Psychiatry professor Joel E Dimsdale’s Dark Persuasion: A History of Brainwashing from Pavlov to Social Media (Yale University Press) is teeming with intriguing tales of mental manipulation, including accounts of the Jim Jones cult, Patty Hearst’s post-kidnap transformation and the whole thorny subject of Stockholm Syndrome.