Chris Petit’s The Butchers of Berlin (Simon & Schuster) is the story of a murder investigation in Berlin in 1943, when the Nazis knew the war was going against them and the city was being cleared of Jews. Unnerving in its depiction of a time when killing was an everyday occurrence, this dark and powerful novel is in a category of its own: once you’ve started reading it, you won’t easily be able to put it aside. Charles Foster’s Being a Beast (Profile Books) is the record of the author’s attempts to find out what it is like to be a non-human animal, a quest that involved living in a badger’s hole, eating worms and being hunted as a deer. A book in the singular genre of J A Baker’s shamanistic masterpiece The Peregrine, Foster’s account is precise, poetic and thought-stirring.
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