It’s A Don’s Life

Mary Beard (Profile, £8.99)

Beard, a Classics Professor at Cambridge, has been blogging for The Times for more than three years, and this book presents many of her best musings. She’s an entertaining writer, and there’s much of interest about university life and Roman emperors, as well as debates about exams and sexual harassment. She has included some of the responses to her blogs, which are often just as interesting as the original pieces. As a representative of Cambridge’s only remaining women’s college, Newnham, she also provides a succinct defence of single-sex education.

The Immigrant Manju Kapur (Faber, £7.99)

This is also about a female academic, but it’s a very different story, reflecting the age of the immigrant, of people on the move in a cosmopolitan world. Kapur’s Indian heroine, Nina, is 30 when she succumbs to an arranged marriage to Ananda, who lives in Canada. Her problems could be those of anyone who has to adjust to a new life, and Kapur’s keen eye picks up the everyday frustrations of modern living.