WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Red Hands by Colin Sargent
Love, loss and rueful laughter in Ceauscescu-era Romania
Iordana Ceauscescu
[Barbican Press] 
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
Prizes all round: the Bard hands plaudits to the Miners Gala, OT&JC, Joe Solo, Black Sabbath’s frontman and the Lionesses
Star cartoonist JAMIE BRITTON is in awe of a graphic novel of epic proportions that explores class, religion and globalisation via the strange cultivation of Ginseng in the US Midwest
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
HAZ de necaz. The term – Romanian for rueful laughter – fittingly appears a number of times in this novel. It pretty much describes Red Hands’ tone – tragedy hardened further by comedy.
After his extraordinary second novel The Boston Castrato, Colin Sargent shifts his intelligent and sharp focus from the US of the 1920s to the Romania of the 1960s onwards.
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PAUL SIMON falls under the spell of little known authors from an island at the edge of the world
