David Hajdu: Positively Fourth Street (Bloomsbury)

NOW OUT in paperback, this engrossing account of the intertwined lives of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña from the late '50s to 1966 is compulsive reading for anyone who wants to understand the links between the beats, folk and the injection of poetry into rock. Of the protagonists, Joan is all sincerity – it’s wonderful to contemplate her putting the world to rights over a bowl of what now seems like a very un-PC beef stew – while her sister Mimi, still in her teens when she married Richard Fariña, is all naivety.