Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman. In his completely charming and joyful memoir Nina Simone’s Gum, Ellis tells the story of his acquisition and stewardship of this magical keepsake, but also of vocation, understanding, interconnectedness, and the power of artistic communities to support and sustain their members and fans.

Carey’s new thriller, the sequel to last year’s excellent Widowland, has acquired unexpected resonance by being published shortly after the Queen’s death, but it remains exciting and provocative dystopian fiction. In an alternative postwar Britain living under a Nazi “protectorate”, Hitler has been assassinated by the book’s protagonist, Rose Ransom, and the country has plunged into paranoia and reprisals. As rumours swirl that the usurped Princess Elizabeth will return to Britain, Rose finds herself alongside an unlikely ally, none other than Queen Wallis Simpson. Nina Simone’s Gum

His book, and the many self-taken photographs that illuminate the oddness of the story, has a strange, mystical, quality transcending storytelling; it is a case study in existentialism. In places it reminded me of the first half of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, before stuff turns dark. Warren has turned this memento, snatched from his idol’s piano in a moment of rapture, into a genuine religious artefact.’ Twenty-one years have passed. The piece of chewing gum belonging to Nina Simone, which Warren retrieved from the piano at the Meltdown festival and rolled up in her hand towel, is being placed on a marble pedestal in a velvet-lined, temperature-controlled viewing box. We are in the Hallway of Gratitude, part of the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition at the Royal Danish library. As the chief conservator places the little piece of grey gum on the plinth like a hallowed relic, we are all silent, awed.

Ellis is not – and this is the saving grace of his book, already into its third reprint – a professional writer. He’s better than that. I did what she asked and introduced her to the crowd, and then stood in the wings and watched her negotiate the stairs to the stage – it was clear that Nina Simone was not well. Ellis: No, I feel relieved. The gum is kept in a safe, in a specially designed box that keeps it at the right temperature, so that the colour and the structure don't change. Actually, they don't know what to do with it, and I don't know what to do with it. But it's so beautiful. Of course I was worried about losing my mojo. But letting it go was like making a record and putting it out into the world. It got a life.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Frenzied with the knowledge that this stranger’s steady hands were the first to touch the gum since Nina Simone’s, Ellis felt an edge of sorrow that any touch might break the spell: Sometimes even writing it, I’d sort of pinch myself and go, ‘I’m writing about a piece of chewing gum,’” he says. “Then I realized what I was writing about, these exchanges with people, and things like that. The first few years Ellis had the gum, he kept it in his briefcase, taking it on tour and anywhere he traveled. That’s when it became something,” he says of his decision to send the gum into the world. “When I felt what people brought to it, when they care.